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Regulated software quality is a most timely question for software industry nowadays. Most of the software systems used in industrial size has reached the state when its internal quality has decreased considerably over the longer follow-up time period (10 to 20 years), i.e. it has reached the critical threshold when the continuous quality control is essential for sustainable maintenance costs. The tendency experienced in software projects recently, i.e. existing systems are usually adapted, ready modules are typically used due to short deadlines and depressed prices, also contributed to continuous decrease in quality. Software quality is of special importance in such crucial application fields such as medicine, pharmaceutical industry, other biotechnology, or energetics, to guarantee reliability. To ensure software quality is an inevitable expenditure for software enterprises and for companies based on informatics through management and technical development systems. The table below on software introductory costs shows that maintenance cost after delivery usually several times exceeds initial development costs considering the total costs of the life cycle of the installed software. Companies spend roughly 50 percent of their software costs on follow-up after delivery, i.e. software maintenance; it is several ten billion forints in Hungary and several ten billion dollars (euros) internationally yearl Software Quality –To Assure Software Quality Two, not excluding rather enforcing, approaches are known for software quality assurance. 1. The more widespread approach is the quality assurance of the development process of a given software development organization, to which well developed procedures and standards are available. Not only in case of newly developed projects but also after the delivery of installed software, development process of the software development companies (communities) improves in quality by quality control process. 2. A subsequent modification request (such as correction, functional extension, adjustment to new environment) to large, existing industrial applications entails significant costs (million or sometimes billion in size). The modification costs can be considerably reduced by the improvement of the so called internal quality of the software, when we receive a better maintainable system by redesigning, restructuring. Therefore the quality assurance of software under development, or existing old ones (so called ancient systems) as products, by continuous measurement, checking and patching, is a supplement to process quality assurance in many cases. The research subproject examines such software quality problems essentially by product quality assurance, which concern software development and maintenance following the initial development period, such as error correction, upgrade, adjustment, migration and quality improvement. The subproject aims to search for such software quality methods and methodology, and to develop such technologies and tools that |