ISO/IEC 9126 standard
Normative framework - Software product

The standard defined three main categories of software products:

• customized products ;

• Software packages, also known as "off-the-shelf software";

• embedded software, integrated into hardware (firmware).

The quality of a software product must be defined at the design stage. To achieve this, appropriate key factors must be selected. Criteria must take into account the specific features of the software product to be built, and the objectives of use according to the technologies used. For each criterion selected, a set of commonly accepted and validated metrics must be used to verify satisfaction of these criteria.