Who cares about Software Quality?

For a software product there are primarily five groups of people (role) who care about quality of software.

1. Sponsors
2. Development Team
3. Purchasers
4. Users
5. Maintenance Team

In case of in-house development, non-productized software either Purchasers do not exist or Purchasers and Users become one.

Software has three dimensions of quality:
1. Functional
2. Structural
3. Process

Functional quality means that the software correctly performs the tasks it is supposed to do. The aspects of functional quality are:

Requirement fulfillment: For any software meeting functional requirements is Raison d'être.

Usability: No one is interested in software which is difficult to use and understand.

Structural quality is deals with code quality and non-functional requirements ( –bilities). It is difficult to test and measure.

The attributes of process quality are:

Delivery schedule: Are various pieces of software delivered on time?

Budgets: Are various pieces of software delivered within budget?

Repeatable development process: Even if software meets delivery schedule and within budget but it is not process driven, not a team work and cannot be created by similar team then process is not repeatable.

Process quality means being consistent from one project to the next.

Affordability: Software which has zero bugs but missing any aspects of time, budget, functionality or structure is of no use.

The process quality affects the value received by users, development team, development team, purchasers, and sponsors, and so all five groups have a stake in improving this aspect of software quality.