ISO/IEC 25021:2012 provides guides to specify Quality Measure Elements (QME) and initial set of QME as examples. QME is a measure defined in terms of a property and the measurement method for quantifying it, including optionally the transformation by a mathematical function.

ISO/IEC 25021:2012 is intended to be used throughout the system and software product life cycle used with other documents of the ISO/IEC 250nn SQuaRE series, especially ISO/IEC 25022, ISO/IEC 25023 and ISO/IEC 25024.