Coverage: ISO 25010 Software Quality Model¶
Source: https://iso25000.com/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010 Mapped against spec version: 0.3.0 Last reviewed: 2026-07-18
Mapped against the eight product quality characteristics of ISO/IEC 25010:2011 (the 2023 revision reorganizes them and adds Safety; the mapping below holds for both, with Safety noted at the end). This mapping reads differently from the checklist frameworks: ISO 25010 describes qualities a product should have, while this assessment evaluates practices a team performs. The table therefore answers: "which of our items produce or verify evidence for this quality?" The assessment covers 5 of 8 characteristics in full and 3 partially.
| # | Characteristic (sub-characteristics) | Our item(s) | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Functional Suitability (completeness, correctness, appropriateness) | 1.4 Functional and Non-Functional Requirements, 1.6 User Research & Feedback Loops, 5.5 Project Testing, 4.1 Relevance of Codebase | ✅ Full |
| 2 | Performance Efficiency (time behaviour, resource use, capacity) | 3.5 Scalability & Performance, 5.7 Optimizations | ✅ Full |
| 3 | Compatibility (co-existence, interoperability) | 3.8 APIs & Integrations | ⚠️ Partial |
| 4 | Usability (learnability, operability, accessibility, error protection) | 1.6 User Research & Feedback Loops, 1.8 Compliance & Legal Requirements (accessibility) | ⚠️ Partial |
| 5 | Reliability (maturity, availability, fault tolerance, recoverability) | 3.6 Resilience & Fault Tolerance, 5.10 Recovery Plan, 5.12 Monitoring & Alerting Quality | ✅ Full |
| 6 | Security (confidentiality, integrity, accountability, authenticity) | Category 6 (6.1–6.10) | ✅ Full |
| 7 | Maintainability (modularity, reusability, analysability, modifiability, testability) | 3.4 Loose Coupling / High Cohesion, 4.2 Patterns, 4.3 Code Style, 4.6 Technical Debt, 4.8 Unit Tests, 4.11 Documentation & Domain Language | ✅ Full |
| 8 | Portability (adaptability, installability, replaceability) | 5.2 Project Installation, 5.3 Project Launch, 5.14 Infrastructure as Code | ⚠️ Partial |
Notes on partial coverage¶
- Compatibility. Interoperability is well covered by 3.8 (contracts, versioning, integration testing), but co-existence — behaving well while sharing an environment with other software — is never asked. Minor in practice; it matters mostly for installed/embedded software.
- Usability. The largest real gap in the whole coverage series. 1.6 covers whether user feedback flows back into the product, and 1.8 catches accessibility as a compliance obligation, but no item assesses UX practice itself: usability testing, design review, error-message quality, learnability. A dedicated "UX & Accessibility" item (category 1) is the strongest candidate this series has produced for a future MINOR release.
- Portability. Installability is covered (5.2, 5.3) and IaC (5.14) makes environments reproducible, but adaptability (moving to a different platform/cloud) and replaceability are not asked. Deliberately thin: for most teams this is a low-importance item, and the importance rating mechanism handles that better than omitting the quality entirely.
Note on ISO 25010:2023¶
The 2023 revision adds Safety (harm avoidance) as a ninth characteristic. It is not covered: no item assesses functional safety. Deliberate for now — safety-critical domains (medical, automotive, industrial) have dedicated standards (IEC 61508, ISO 26262) that a generic maturity assessment should not imitate. Teams in those domains should record this under the category "Other" items.
Summary judgment¶
The practices assessed here produce evidence for every 2011 characteristic except parts of usability. ISO 25010 works well as a complement: use it to name the qualities a product needs, then use this assessment to check whether the practices that deliver those qualities exist and how mature they are.