| Organizations are constantly in search of competitive advantages in today's complex global marketplace through improvement of quality, better affordability, and quicker delivery of products and services. This is significantly true for software as a product and service. With other things being equal, the quality of software will impact consumers, organizations, and nations. The quality and efficiency of the process utilized to create and deploy software can result in cost and schedule overruns, cancelled projects, loss of revenue, loss of market share, and loss of consumer confidence. Hence, it behooves us to constantly explore quality management strategies to deliver high quality software quickly at an affordable price.;This research identifies software quality management best practices derived from scholarly literature using bibliometric techniques in conjunction with literature review, synthesizes these best practices into an assessment tool for industrial practitioners, refines the assessment tool based on academic expert review, further refines the assessment tool based on a pilot test with industry experts, and undertakes industry expert validation. Key elements of this software quality assessment tool include issues dealing with people, organizational environment, process, and technology best practices. Additionally, weights were assigned to issues of people, organizational environment, process, and technology best practices based on their relative importance, to calculate an overall weighted score for organizations to evaluate where they stand with respect to their peers in pursuing the business of producing quality software. This research study indicates that people best practices carry 40% of overall weight, organizational best practices carry 30% of overall weight, process best practices carry 15% of overall weight, and technology best practices carry 15% of overall weight. The assessment tool that is developed will be valuable to organizations that seek to take advantage of rapid innovations in pursuing higher software quality. These organizations can use the assessment tool for implementing best practices based on the latest cutting edge management strategies that can lead to improved software quality and other competitive advantages in the global marketplace.;This research contributed to the current academic literature in software quality by presenting a quality assessment tool based on software quality management best practices, contributed to the body of knowledge on software quality management, and expanded the knowledgebase on quality management practices. This research also contributed to current professional practice by incorporating software quality management best practices into a quality management assessment tool to evaluate software. |
