Installability

Installability is the degree of effectiveness and efficiency with which a product or system can be successfully installed, and/or uninstalled, in a specified environment. It’s a quality attribute, and specifically a sub-characteristic of portability in the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model.

A highly installable system requires little manual intervention or specialist knowledge to set up correctly, fails predictably and informatively when it can’t be installed, and can be removed again without leaving the environment in a clean state.

These concerns matter well beyond desktop software. Automated deployment pipelines, container images, and infrastructure-as-code all depend on their targets being reliably and repeatably installable.

References

• ISO/IEC (2023). ISO/IEC 25010:2023 — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — Quality model.