  Interconnected computers and software systems have become an indispensable
part of people's lives, therefore software quality research is becoming more
and more important. There have been multiple attempts to synthesize knowledge
gained in software quality research, however, they were focused mainly on
single aspects of software quality and not to structure the knowledge in a
holistic way. The aim of our study was to close this gap. The software quality
publications were harvested from the Scopus bibliographic database. The
metadata was exported first to CRexlporer, which was employed to identify
historical roots, and next to VOSViewer, which was used as a part of the
synthetic content analysis. In our study we defined synthetic context analysis
as a triangulation of bibliometrics and content analysis. Our search resulted
in 14451 publications. The performance bibliometric study showed that the
production of research publications relating to software quality is currently
following an exponential growth trend and that the software quality research
community is growing. The most productive country was the United States and the
most productive Institution The Florida Atlantic University. The synthetic
content analysis revealed that the published knowledge can be structured into
10 themes, the most important being the themes regarding software quality
improvement with enhancing software engineering, advanced software testing, and
improved defect and fault prediction with machine learning and data mining.
According to the analysis of the hot topics, it seems that future research will
be directed into developing and using a full specter of new artificial
intelligence tools (not just machine learning and data mining) and focusing on
how to assure software quality in agile development paradigms.
