Quality characteristics – ISO25010

Note: In 2023 the International Standards Organization has published a new version of the ISO25010 standard and a separate ISO25019 standard for quality in use. The opinion of the TMAP-team is that these changes don’t improve quality engineering & testing.  As stated on the quality characteristics page we advise you to make your own selection of relevant quality characteristics instead of just using a standard list. We have chosen to maintain the 2011 version of the ISO25010 on this page.

ISO 25010 quality characteristics for product quality

The quality characteristics and their subcharacteristics for product quality are:

• Functional suitability – The degree to which a product or system provides functions that meet stated and implied needs when used under specified conditions.
  Functional completeness 
  Functional correctness 
  Functional appropriateness
• Performance efficiency – The performance relative to the amount of resources used under stated condition.
  Time behavior 
  Resource utilization 
  Capacity
• Compatibility – The degree to which a product, system or component can exchange information with other products, systems or components, and/or perform its required functions, while sharing the same hardware or software environment.
  Co-existence 
  Interoperability
• Usability – The degree to which a product or system can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. Appropriateness recognizability 
  Learnability 
  Operability 
  User error protection 
  User interface aesthetics 
  Accessibility
• Reliability – The degree to which a system, product or component performs specified functions under specified conditions for a specified period of time.
  Maturity 
  Availability 
  Fault tolerance 
  Recoverability
• Security – The degree to which a product or system protects information and data so that persons or other products or systems have the degree of data access appropriate to their types and levels of authorization.
  Confidentiality
  Integrity 
  Non-repudiation 
  Accountability 
  Authenticity
• Maintainability – The degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which a product or system can be modified by the intended maintainers.
  Modularity 
  Reusability 
  Analysability 
  Modifiability 
  Testability
• Portability – The degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which a system, product or component can be transferred from one hardware, software or other operational or usage environment to another.
  Adaptability 
  Installability 
  Replaceability

Remarks about Functionality and Reliability

The most important aspect of the quality of an IT system is Functionality. This is about whether it does what it is supposed to do. It also relates to the data that is used, as the functionality of GenAI models depends not only on the quality of the training data but also on the relevance of the context, the structure of the prompt content, and — in the case of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — the effectiveness of the retrieved information.

Users are often inclined to accept any result from a computer system as true. However, with non-deterministic systems—such as GenAI based systems—the results may differ every time the system is used. So, consistency gets a new dimension and is more important than ever before.’

In the ISO25010 standard Reliability relates to the maturity, availability, fault tolerance and recoverability of an IT system. These are related to the technical reliability of a system. To the general public, in the context of GenAI based IT systems, reliability is broader. In this context it is about having confidence that the system will continuously support the user in the same way and that it doesn’t cause surprises about its way of working. It is a combination of technical and functional reliability. Another word used in this context is robustness, and it covers stability and resilience.

Detailed information about these characteristics and their subcharacteristics can be found in [ISO25010 2011].

ISO25010 quality characteristics for quality in use

The quality characteristics and their subcharacteristics for quality in use are:

• Effectiveness – The accuracy and completeness with which users achieve specified goals. (no subcharacteristics)
• Efficiency – The resources expended in relation to the accuracy and completeness with which users achieve goals. (no subcharacteristics)
• Satisfaction – The degree to which user needs are satisfied when a product or system is used in a specified context of use.
  Usefulness
  Trust
  Pleasure
  Comfort
• Freedom from risk – The degree to which a product or system mitigates the potential risk to economic status, human life, health, or the environment.
  Economic risk mitigation
  Health and safety risk mitigation
  Environmental risk mitigation
• Context coverage – The degree to which a product or system can be used with effectiveness, efficiency, freedom from risk and satisfaction in both specified contexts of use and in contexts beyond those initially explicitly identified.
  Context completeness
  Flexibility

Detailed information about these characteristics and their subcharacteristics can be found in [ISO25010 2011].

Sogeti has defined three extensions to the ISO25010 standard. The first extension was published in 2018 and contains 3 additional product quality characteristics related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. The second extension was published in 2022 and contains 1 additional characteristic for quality in use about Sustainability. The third extension related to GenAI published in 2025 also contains 1 additional characteristic, namely Humaneness.