ABSTRACT

Another definition of quality, the customer’s, is the one we will use. With this definition, the customer defines quality as to whether or not the product or service does what the customer needs. Another way of wording it is “fit for use.” There should also be a description of the purpose of the product, typically documented in a customer’s “requirements specification” (see Appendix C, Requirements Specification, for more details). The requirements are the most important document, and the quality system revolves around it. In addition, quality

attributes

are described in the customer’s requirements specification. Examples include usability, the relative ease with which a user communicates with the application, portability, the capability of the system to be executed across a diverse range of hardware architectures, and reusability, the ability to transfer software components constructed in one software system into another.