First off all quality of computer software is conformance to requirements and absence of bugs. Anti-patterns are common problems that happen frequently in computer programming and that should be avoided to achieve quality. The term quality is used to refer to the desirability of properties or characteristics of a person, object, or process. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Requirements analysis, in software engineering, is a term used to describe all the tasks that go into the instigation, scoping and definition of a new or altered computer system. ... A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from working correctly or produces an incorrect result. ... In computer science, anti-patterns are problems that happen frequently in computer programming and that should be avoided in good practice. ...

Factors of software quality

• Product quality
  • conformance to requirements or program specification
  • Correctness
  • Completeness
  • absence of bugs
  • Fault-tolerance
• Source code quality

To a computer, there is no real concept of "well-written" source code. However, to a human, the way a program is written can have some important consequences for the human maintainers. Many source code programming style guides, which stress readability and some language-specific conventions are aimed at the maintenance of the software source code, which involves debugging and updating. Other issues also come into considering whether code is well written, such as the logical structuring of the code into manageable sections. Requirements analysis, in software engineering, is a term used to describe all the tasks that go into the instigation, scoping and definition of a new or altered computer system. ... A program specification is the definition of what a computer program is expected to do. ... In theoretical computer science, correctness of an algorithm is asserted when it is said that the algorithm is correct with respect to a specification. ... In mathematics and related technical fields, a mathematical object is complete if nothing needs to be added to it. ... A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from working correctly or produces an incorrect result. ... In computer science, Fault-tolerance is the property of a computer system to continue operation at an acceptable quality, despite the unexpected occurrence of hardware or software failures. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... Programming style (also called coding standards or code convention) is a term that describes conventions for writing source code in a certain programming language. ...

• Scalability
• readability
• easiness maintenance, testing, debugging, fixing, modification and portability
• low complexity
• low resources consumption: memory, CPU
• ...

Methods to improve the quality: refactoring. In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability indicates the capability of a system to increase performance under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. ... Readability is a measure of the comprehensibility or understandability of written text. ... Software maintenance is one of the activities in software engineering, and is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. ... Software testing is a process used to identify the correctness, completeness and quality of developed computer software. ... Debugging is a methodical process of finding and reducing the number of bugs, or defects, in a computer program or a piece of electronic hardware thus making it behave as expected. ... There are different senses of complexity: In information processing, complexity is a measure of the total number of properties transmitted by an object and detected by an observer. ... The terms storage (U.K. and U.S.) or memory (U.S.) refer to the parts of a digital computer that retain physical state (data) for some interval of time, possibly even after electrical power to the computer is turned off. ... The central processing unit (CPU) is the part of a computer that interprets and carries out the instructions contained in the software. ... Refactoring is the process of rewriting written material to improve its readability or structure, with the explicit purpose of keeping its meaning or behavior. ...

See also

• Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination
• Quality: Quality control, Total Quality Management
• Capability Maturity Model
• Software Engineering
• Assertion (computing)
• Splint (programming tool)
• Optimization (computer science)
• Algorithmic efficiency
• Order
  • Programming paradigm
  • Programming style
  • Software architecture
• Software metrics
  • Cyclomatic complexity
  • Cohesion and Coupling