focus 22 IEEE SOFTWARE Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0740-7459/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE guest editors’ introduction J. David Blaine, independent consultant Jane Cleland-Huang, DePaul University S oftware quality is perhaps one of the most sought-after but unattained goals in software development. It’s often understood, in a rather limited way, to mean the act of ensuring that a product meets its speciﬁed requirements. Unfortu- nately, this narrow viewpoint has led to the situation in which many quality as- surance departments focus almost exclusively on testing and review and fail to address the more far-reaching questions that might differentiate between high-quality and mediocre renderings of the same product. Software Quality Requirements: How to Balance Competing Priorities