ISO/IEC 9126

[1] The fundamental objective of the ISO/IEC 9126 standard is to address some of the well-known human biases that can adversely affect the delivery and perception of a software development project.

By clarifying, then agreeing on the project priorities and subsequently converting abstract priorities (compliance) to measurable values (output data can be validated against schema X with zero intervention), ISO/IEC 9126 tries to develop a common understanding of the project's objectives and goals.

Software product is defined in a broad sense: it encompasses executables, source code, architecture descriptions, and so on.

This standard stems from the GE model for describing software quality, presented in 1977 by McCall et al., which is organized around three types of quality characteristic: ISO/IEC 9126 distinguishes between a defect and a nonconformity, a defect being "The nonfulfilment of intended usage requirements", whereas a nonconformity is "The nonfulfilment of specified requirements".

ISO/IEC then started work on SQuaRE (Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation), a more extensive series of standards to replace ISO/IEC 9126, with numbers of the form ISO/IEC 250mn.