Exploring perceived quality in software organizations

Software projects have four main objectives; produce required functionalities, with acceptable quality, in budget and in schedule. Usually these objectives are implemented by setting requirements for the software projects, and working towards achieving these requirements as well as possible. So how is the intended quality handled in this process of pursuing project goals? The objective of this study is to explore how organizations understand software quality and identify factors which seem to affect the quality outcome of the development process. The study applies two research approaches; a survey with 31 organizations and in-depth interviews with 36 software professional from 12 organizations for identifying concepts that affect quality. The study confirms that the quality in software organization is a complex, interconnected entity, and the definitions of desired and perceived quality fluctuate between different process stakeholders. Overall, in many cases the software organizations have identified the desired quality, but are not communicating it properly.