This part of ISO/IEC 14598 provides requirements and recommendations for the practical implementation of software product evaluation when several parties need to understand, accept and trust evaluation results. In particular, it may be used to apply the concepts described in ISO/IEC 9126.

The process described in this part of ISO/IEC 14598 defines the activities needed to analyse evaluation requirements, to specify, design and perform evaluation actions and to conclude the evaluation of any kind of software product.

The evaluation process may be used to evaluate already existing products, provided the needed product components are available, or to evaluate products in development.

This part of ISO/IEC 14598 may be used by

• testing laboratory evaluators, when providing software product evaluation services,
• software suppliers, when planning evaluation of their products, including evaluation to be carried out by independent testing services,
• software acquirers, when requesting evaluation information from a supplier or testing service,
• software users when evaluating products or when using evaluation reports provided by testing laboratories,
• certification bodies in defining new certification schemes for software products.