Before the ISO Standards came into market, many organizations were using their own standards for the development and testing processes for software. But it was not good for maintaining the quality of the software, therefore some standards are created in order to maintain the quality of the software product and to use the right techniques in software testing. These standards set quality rules and procedures for improvement of the software and their user experience. In this tutorial, you will be learning all about some common International Standards widely used in software development for achieving high performance of QA and testing of a product.

The International Standard for Software Testing: 

The standard having the number 29119 is developed for maintaining the correct software testing procedures for the software development. ISO/IEC/IEEE Standard 29119 is a collection of standards for software testing of any SDLC phases for any organization. For increasing the International Quality Assurance, we need to implement this standard in our software testing process, only then we will get Internationally recognized product. 

ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 consists of five standards for international software testing standards which are: 

• ISO/IEC 29119-1: This standard gives the concepts and meanings of software which are very useful in software development processes. This standard was published in September 2013.
• ISO/IEC 29119-2: This standard is also sub part of ISO Standard 29119 which deals with all the test processes for a better product output. This standard was also published in September 2013.
• ISO/IEC 29119-3: This standard has other importance related to the documentation of the product; therefore, it is responsible for delivering the complete documentation of the product. This standard is also published with previous 2 standards just discussed above, in September 2013.
• ISO/IEC 29119-4: This standard gives the right testing techniques and strategies for doing the software testing. This standard was published in 2014.
• ISO/IEC 29119-5: ISO 29119-5 has some unique importance that deals with keyword-based software testing which means that a keyword is used in complete testing and obtained the results, the keyword can be any word which can give better testing results. This Standard was published in 2015.

ISO/IEC 9241-11: 

This standard deals with the customer or users’ satisfaction of the product and the effectiveness and efficiency of the product is also described in this standard. This standard must be included in any software development process for achieving best user experience and increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the product.

ISO/IEC 25000-2005:

This standard has a greater importance in software development as it provides the procedures and rules for achieving the best software quality requirements and evaluation (SQuaRE) of the software. This standard replaced ISO-9126 and ISO-14598, such that all the features are included in this only standard.

SQuaRE is an abbreviation used for Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation, has some sub-parts of the standard which are:

• ISO 2500N – This standard is used for managing the quality divisions.
• ISO 2501N – This standard deal with Quality Model Division of the software development.
• ISO 2502N – ISO 2502N standard consist of Quality Measurement Division which are also related to Software Quality metrics.
• ISO 2503N – This ISO standard is useful for the divisions of software quality requirements.
• ISO 2504N – This standard deal with Quality Evaluation Division of the software.

ISO/IEC 9126: 

This standard is also useful for determining the Quality of the Software product which includes – quality model of the software, the metrics related to the quality, the internal and external metrics of the software application. This standard is a popular standard because of its usage and importance in software testing.

The quality attributes considered in this standard are 

• maintainability, 
• usability, 
• portability and 
• functionality. 

The other attributes can also be included which are 

• user’s reliability of the software, 
• the right working of the product and
• the high efficiency too.

ISO/IEC 12119:

This ISO standard is responsible for the software packages which are to be delivered to customer or users. The main aim of this Standard is to deliver the quality software package as possible for the customer, but this standard doesn’t deal with customer or client production process, rather it deals with software package production processes. It gives the brief idea about the requirements for software packages and the steps which are used to test any software package after the deployment or the delivery according to the specified requirements.

There are also some other common software testing standards. A software tester much have at least basic knowledge about these common testing standards. These standards are:

• IEEE 730: This standard deals with the QA of software application.
• IEEE 829: This standard gives the format for the documentation of the software requirements and other factors.
• IEEE 830: This standard deals with the complete guide for creating software requirements specification document.
• IEEE 1008: This standard gives the complete information for performing unit testing on our software product.
• IEEE 1012: IEEE 1012 gives proper direction for verification and validation of the software product.
• IEEE 1028: It introduces the steps of inspections of the software application.
• IEEE 1044: This standard classifies different software anomalies.
• IEEE 1044-1: This standard is used as a guide for classification of software anomalies.
• IEEE 1059: A standard for the plans related to verification and validation of the software product.
• IEEE 1061: This standard is used for setting up quality necessities, distinguishing, carrying out, examining, and approving the interaction, and result of programming quality measurements.
• IEEE 12207: This standard deals with all the life cycle processes or the life cycle models of software development.
• BS 7925-1: This standard is made for performing keyword software testing using vocabulary terms in software testing.
• BS 7925-2: A standard which is useful for testing components of a software.