A comprehensible and operational software quality standard for germany. The standard defines clear guidelines for software development, quality assurance and audit of software systems and therefore establishes reliability for software producers and users.
Motivation
Software quality models provide either abstract quality characteristics or concrete quality measurements; there is no seamless integration of these two aspects. Quality assessment approaches are, hence, also very specific or remain abstract. Reasons for this include the complexity of quality and the various quality profiles in different domains which make it difficult to build operationalised quality models. Our aim was to develop and validate operationalised quality models for software together with a quality assessment method and tool support to provide the missing connections between generic descriptions of software quality characteristics and specific software analysis and measurement approaches. As a single operationalised quality model that fits all peculiarities of every software domain would be extremely large and expensive to develop, we also set the goal of enabling modularised quality models with a widely applicable base model and various specific extensions. This also constrained the types of analyses and measurements to include: We included static analyses and manual reviews, because they are least dependent on the system context. In contrast, dynamic testing of a system would require specific test cases and execution environments. Furthermore, we focused on product quality and, hence, product aspects influencing quality, instead of on process or people aspects. While we consider the latter aspects important as well, we expected the product aspects to be easier and more direct to measure.
Goals
- A new meta-model for quality that allows to model quality from different perspectives.
- An aggregation and evaluation model that allows to calculate and express the overall quality.
- A base qualtiy model for Java, C/C++ and C# software – applicable for software projects (products) of an arbitrary application domain.
- Domain-specific quality models, especially for embedded systems and for SOA-based software.
Results
- The public available results of the projects (quality models, quality model editor, quality evaluation tool) is available here.
- A validated base quality model for Java with approx. 500 measures
- An embedded quality model for C/C++ with approx. 350 measures. This quality model also forms the basis for a later developped quality model for safety critical system (ISO/IEC 61508)
- A validated method and tool for the systematic tailoring of quality model to the needs of organizations
Duration
2009 – 2012
Partners Cap Gemini, Fraunhofer IESE, itestra, SAP Research, Siemens Corporate Technology, Technical University Munich
Contact Reinhold Plösch
Publications