A Framework for Evaluating the Software Product Quality of Pregnancy Monitoring Mobile Personal Health Records

Stakeholders’ needs and expectations are identified by means of software quality requirements, which have an impact on software product quality. In this paper, we present a set of requirements for mobile personal health records (mPHRs) for pregnancy monitoring, which have been extracted from literature and existing mobile apps on the market. We also use the ISO/IEC 25030 standard to suggest the requirements that should be considered during the quality evaluation of these mPHRs. We then go on to design a checklist in which we contrast the mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring requirements with software product quality characteristics and sub-characteristics in order to calculate the impact of these requirements on software product quality, using the ISO/IEC 25010 software product quality standard. The results obtained show that the requirements related to the user’s actions and the app’s features have the most impact on the external sub-characteristics of the software product quality model. The only sub-characteristic affected by all the requirements is Appropriateness of Functional suitability. The characteristic Operability is affected by 95 % of the requirements while the lowest degrees of impact were identified for Compatibility (15 %) and Transferability (6 %). Lastly, the degrees of the impact of the mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring requirements are discussed in order to provide appropriate recommendations for the developers and stakeholders of mPHRs for pregnancy monitoring. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.