Quality Assessment of Standard and Customized COTS Products

Software quality is a very important aspect in evolving strategy for IT vendors involved in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) (also referred as packaged software) product development. Software metrics are widely accepted measures for monitoring and managing the quality in software projects. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are COTS products and attempt to integrate data and processes in organizations and often require extensive customization. Using software quality metrics already established in literature, software quality attributes defined by the quality model ISO/IEC 9126 were evaluated for a standard and a customized ERP product. This will help the ERP team to identify the specific quality attributes that were affected owing to customization. This research study infers that there exists a considerable impact of ERP system customization over the quality of ERP product. The implications of the findings for both practice and research are discussed, and possible areas of future research are identified.