Editor’s Note: All papers in the Proceedings of the XVIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality (SBQS 2019) are in Portuguese.

Companies use customer relationship management (CRM) systems to collect/update/integrate client data. Actually, there is more to it: CRM should be viewed bidirectionally, with the customers deeply involved, proactively and reactively--the system becoming a customer enhancement center [1]. This paper analyzes the quality of such systems, synthesizing their necessary features as they come out from a systematic mapping of the technical literature. Its targeted audience includes professionals and researchers from the CRM domain. The presentation level is industry/academia.

Speaking about audience, we have a problem: the paper is written in Portuguese. I used Google Translate to get an English version, and I worked to understand all the details. I don’t know how many people with a genuine interest in CRM would follow my lead, which is a pity because the paper makes some very good points.

Any discussion about quality evaluation starts with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 25000 standards (https://www.iso.org/standard/64764.html): they define the general criteria of quality. The authors also consider previous standards (ISO/IEC 9126, https://www.iso.org/standard/22749.html). To particularize them for CRM, two questions have to be answered:

(1) Which quality characteristics from ISO/IEC 25000 and 9126 are relevant in the CRM context?

(2) What quality characteristics are not present in ISO/IEC 25000 or 9126, but are still relevant in the CRM context?

Using an approach based on the PICO methodology, the authors devise a search string (having CRM as the main keyword) and apply it to Elsevier’s Scopus database. In this way, they find 201 articles dealing with CRM systems. Some ingenious inclusion/exclusion criteria were used to refine and limit the initial list: 27 titles remained. The references contained in these articles led to a second list of 13 titles: articles that do not refer to the ISO standard, while still relevant for the CRM domain. Each quality characteristic means actually a group of functionalities. All quality characteristics found in the articles, together with the corresponding functionalities, are extracted and analyzed.

In the analysis, the authors identify a consensus when considering the functionalities in three separate groups [2]: operational (support for planning/marketing/sales), collaborative (support for interaction with customers), and analytical (support for business intelligence).

Finally, some CRM systems are identified: Mobile-CRM [3], Cloud-CRM [4], and IoT-CRM [5]. For these categories, besides the general quality features, the authors analyze the specifics separately. All this together offers an integrative vision of the whole domain.