The success of any software application depends on the quality of the application and is in turn an important factor for the success of the IT organization. Customer satisfaction is an important factor for the success of any company and in case of IT concerns it is achieved through providing the clients with high quality of software applications. There are a large number of factors or aspects that determine the quality and performance of the software application apart from test automation.
Flexibility and Extensibility:
Flexibility may be defined as the ability of any software application of adding, modifying or removing any functionality from the system without damaging the same. Extensibility on the other hand is the ability of a software application in terms of adding more functionality without causing any damage to the system. This can also be thought of similar to a subset of flexibility. The changes in the functionality often occur in accordance to the varying requirements. It may also be seen as an obligation in case the development process ranks as one of the iterative methods. With Change being an inevitable element in the development of software, this makes it to rank as one of the most important properties with respect to the quality of the software application.
Maintainability and Readability:
Maintainability focuses on the modifications regarding error corrections as well as minor ones related to the functions and not the major extensibilities of functions. These modifications are able to be supported with valuable interface definitions, documentations, as well as self documenting codes and may be the code documentations. The relationship between maintainability and documentation is directly proportional. With the documentation being more useful and correct, maintainability also gets enhanced.
Performance and Efficiency:
Performance is generally measured in terms of the time that the software takes to response. This response time of the software needs to be within the acceptable intervals i.e. within a maximum of few seconds.
The response time of the software must not increase with an increase in the transaction count. With the resources being expensive, efficiency of the software needs to be supported with effective allocation of resources.
Scalability:
It has been observed that the response of a scalable system to the user actions is within an acceptable amount of time, even if load increases.
Scalability is of two types Vertical and horizontal. Vertical scalability occurs when more hardware requires to be added for handling effectively a rate of increased user transaction. This should not lead to any changes in the architecture while adding this.
Horizontal Scalability may be expressed as the ability of running a software application on a number of machines that are increasing consistently leading to multiple processing. An ideal scalable system needs to suit both these methods.
Security:
Security is an important attribute of software development as well as its quality. Security is highly significant in terms of mobile based or web or that usually have millions of users and provides the option of remote access to the system.
A security policy needs to be constructed and applied effectively without leaving any points of entry. Constructing a security policy often requires including techniques of authentication and authorization protections against network attacks, data encryptions and more. An effective policy must be aimed at constructing security leaks or else the entire application may collapse within a day not withstanding a single attack resulting in a considerable loss to the developing organization.
Availability, Robustness and Fault Tolerance:
For a software application to be robust enough, it needs to hold on to its availability and not lose it even in the most disastrous situations. This makes it to continue running even if some of the components in the application to fall off or break down.
A robust software application should recover itself, even if the entire application crashes, making sound use of the data and backup hardware powered with approaches of fault tolerance. Always there must be another plan a B or even C, D plans.
Reliability:
Reliability is another factor that determines the quality of the software. It can also be explained in terms of integrity as well as consistency of the software application even while running under conditions of high load. This makes it is relevant to availability as well as scalability as an unreliable system is not scalable.
Testability
A software product must facilitate establishment of an acceptance criteria and support the evaluation or assessment of its performance. This characteristic needs to be built-in at the time of designing the application. This would help in determining if the application is easily testable. A complex design results in poor testability.
Usability
A software application must be usable in the sense that it becomes convenient as well as practicable to use. This feature of the software application is affected by the interface of human-computer. The Graphical User Interface or GUI as it is commonly known as is the software component that is mostly impacted by this
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