Quality Management in Distributed Software Development

The field of software quality management has been subject to extensive studies. This is due to the fact that software is getting more and more important in every situation of life. However, in consequence of disparate requisites according to the respective development setting, as well as product attributes and – finally – diverging understandings of quality itself, there is no such thing as a silver bullet for achieving a high quality software product. This paper describes a quality management system that has been especially designed for assessing and improving the quality of a security sensitive software product (software for performing elections over the Internet) under the constraint that there are geographically and organizationally separate partners involved in the software development process.