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ISO/IEC 9126:2001
ISO/IEC 9126:2001 is industrial standard proposed for quality evaluation.
In 2001 ISO prepared an updated version of the ISO/ IEC 9126:1991 standard also
known as ISO/IEC 9126:2001.
The ISO/IEC 9126-1 quality model is presented on the following figure (from [ISO
9126]):
Figure 10 ISO/IEC 9126:2001 quality model [ISO9126]
As shown on Figure 8, ISO/IEC 9126-1 contains six main quality characteristics:
functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability and portability. Every
characteristic contains sub-characteristics; there are in total 27 sub-characteristics
(suitability, accuracy,…,replaceability, portability compliance). More details and
definitions of ISO/IEC 9126-1: 2001 are available in the Appendix section.
Similarly to the ISO/IEC 9126:1991 standard, ISO/IEC 9126:2001 is also hierarchical,
so every high-level characteristic has a number of related sub-characteristics. ISO/IEC
9126:2001 contains seven more sub-characteristics than ISO/IEC 9126:1991, six of
them are compliance characteristics and the seventh is attractiveness, which was not
part of ISO/IEC 9126:1991.
New Generation of ISO/IEC Software Product Quality Standards
ISO/IEC decided to prepare a new generation of software product quality standards in
order to repair the imperfections of ISO/IEC 9126 standard. [Suryn] and Sawyer
mention several imperfection of ISO/IEC 9126:
- The standard does not tackle quality requirements specification;
- Consistency with other ISO standards published in parallel;
- Scope of applicability, addressing quality needs in system life and user
guidance for various users and methodology for applying quality engineering
instruments within the standard.
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