Early Indicators of Software Quality - how far can we go?

How early can software quality be evaluated and how can it be done? As for quality requirements, several solutions have been proposed in the literature. In spite of the criticism, the ISO/IEC9126 standard has been widely adopted for software quality measurement throughout entire software development life-cycle. Other approaches usually focus on evaluating only some of the quality characteristics at specific life-cycle phases. This paper presents an overview of software quality evaluation methods proposed in the literature with focus on quality verification during early phases of software development life-cycle. We conclude from this preliminary study that the existing methods focus on reliability and efficiency, while other quality aspects are not addressed