Introduction

Information technology (IT) services are increasingly used to perform a wide variety of business and personal functions. IT service quality reflects how well an IT service conforms to its given design or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace.

Specification and evaluation of the quality of an IT service is critical for the IT services to meet the stakeholders’ goals and objectives and this can be achieved by comprehensively defining the quality characteristics associated with the stakeholders' goals and objectives for the IT services.

An IT service is provided by an IT service provider using components like people, processes, technology, facilities and information, and can be orchestrated using an IT service provision system; these components interact with each other to support the service as a whole. Existing software and data quality models are not suitable to measure quality of IT service. IT service quality should be defined and measured by using an IT service quality model and quality measures that take account of these five components interacting.

This document provides quality models to support the specification and evaluation of the quality of IT services that makes use of IT systems as tools to provide value to an individual user or a business by facilitating results the user or business wants to achieve.

The quality models in this document include both objective measures of service quality and measures of the users' perceptions of quality. That is, the IT service quality is using objective measurement as far as possible to qualify the service characteristics, and other methods (such as assessment) can be used to collect objective evidence and qualify intangible features or characteristics of the IT service.

This document is a part of the Quality Model Division (ISO/IEC 2501n) of the SQuaRE series. The IT service quality models defined in this document are intended to be used in conjunction with the other SQuaRE series International Standards, which are represented in Figure 1 (adapted from ISO/IEC 25000).

Figure 1 — Organization of SQuaRE series of International Standards

The divisions within the SQuaRE series are as follows.

— ISO/IEC 2500n — Quality Management Division. The International Standards that form this division define all common models, terms and definitions further referred to by all other International Standards from the SQuaRE series. The division also provides requirements and guidance for a supporting function that is responsible for a supporting function which is responsible for the management of the requirements, specifications and evaluations of software products and service quality.
— ISO/IEC 2501n — Quality Model Division. The International Standards or Technical Specifications that form this division present detailed quality models for software, data and service. Furthermore, in the software and IT service quality model, the internal and external quality characteristics are decomposed into sub-characteristics. Practical guidance on the use of the quality models is also provided.
— ISO/IEC 2502n — Quality Measurement Division. The International Standards that form this division include a software product and service quality measurement reference model, mathematical definitions of quality measures, and practical guidance for their application. Presented measures apply to internal software quality, external software quality, data quality, service quality and quality in use. Quality Measure Elements forming foundations for the latter measures are defined and presented.
— ISO/IEC 2503n — Quality Requirements Division. The International Standard that forms this division helps to specify quality requirements. These quality requirements can be used in the process of quality requirements elicitation for a software product to be developed or as input for an evaluation process and also used in the process of quality requirements elicitation for a service to be provided. The requirements definition process is mapped to technical processes defined in ISO/IEC 15288.
— ISO/IEC 2504n — Quality Evaluation Division. The International Standards that form this division provide requirements, recommendations and guidelines for software product and service evaluation, whether performed by evaluators, acquirers/customers or developers/providers. The support for documenting a measure as an Evaluation Module is also presented.
— ISO/IEC 25050 to ISO/IEC 25099 are reserved for SQuaRE extension International Standards, Technical Specifications, Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) and/or Technical Reports.

PD ISO/IEC TS 25011:2017

Information technology. Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). Service quality models

Current, Under Review

Published:

31 Dec 2017