The W-Process for Software Product Evaluation: A Method for Goal-Oriented Implementation of the ISO 14598 Standard

The importance of software product evaluations will grow with the awareness of the need for better software quality. The process to conduct such evaluations is crucial to get evaluation results that can be applied and meet customers' expectations. This paper reviews a well-known evaluation process: the ISO 14598 standard. The review focuses on the difficulties in selecting and evaluating the appropriate evaluation techniques. The review shows that the standard has problems in applying evaluation processes in practice due to insufficient attention to goal definition and to relationships between activities being implicit. Also, the standard ignores the trade-off between goals and resources and pays insufficient attention to feedback. To address these deficiencies, the W-process is proposed. It extends the standard through an improved process structure and additional guidelines.