In near future, like all products, software systems need a quality certificate. The necessity of certification is growing when components become commodity. Only certified components can be used safely. A second important factor is the legislation.

The quality certificate will grow from an experimental certificate to gain experience to an official widely recognized certificate. The program uses case studies from software industry, delivers a document which describes the properties of the certificate and describes the certification program. The certification program is supported by the Case Study Methodology. Tools are delivered by the Tool Management and Tool Development program. Methodology and techniques come from the programs Model Analysis and Program Analysis.

LaQuSo research is directed to certification of software systems. LaQuSo will follow international standards. The certificate will be developed in close harmony with industry and research partners.

The certification model of LaQuSo is based on the ISO 9126 standard.

In the model there are three domains to investigate the properties of: compliance, system and development. The system diagnosis is split in verdicts about correctness and use.

Compliance issues are standards of W3C or a development environment and demands of the law or the American FDA.
The correctness of the system on issues as suitability, interoperability, accuracy, etc. sometimes can be proven by verification techniques. In many cases statistical methods are added to help predict the quality of the artifacts of the system.
To certify the usability, efficiency and other properties of use among others benchmarking techniques will be used.
Properties of the development quality like portability, replaceability and maintainability need metrics.

So the research on certification is a combination of many research activities and will be proven in experiments with industry.