Software Quality has been a major and focal concern of Software Engineering since its infancy. Despite the proficiency of research addressing quality, quantitative quality assessment methods remain mostly inefficient in industrial contexts. Besides, they are mainly used to control and not to guide the developers, decreasing drastically their potential. As a result, although the field itself is mature and provides a wealth of knowledge, the practical quality assessment of software has still not reached a state where it may be performed satisfactorily. In this research, we propose a framework that supports model-driven and iterative quality assessment in order to help leverage the potential of quantitative assessment and integrate it into the software development process in a more coherent way. This Model-Centric Quality Assessment (MoCQA) framework defines a goal-driven assessment methodology that allows the exploitation of operational customised quality assessment models (or MoCQA models) through a dedicated quality assessment metamodel. The use of a quality assessment metamodel guarantees the integration of heterogeneous quality models and software measurement methods in MoCQA models and let these models adopt an ecosystemic viewpoint on software quality. Besides, the methodology relies extensively on the involvement of stakeholders and let them steadily construct a common mental model of the quality aspects at stakes for a given development project. Through these mechanisms, the framework intends to provide the necessary support for the integration of multiple quantitative quality assessment methods (both existing ones and customised ones) into any type of development and maintenance life-cycles in a meaningful, self-aware and flexible way
Supporting a model-driven and iterative quality assessment methodology: The MoCQA framework
Vanderose, B. (Author). 14 Dec 2012
Student thesis: Doc types › Doctor of Sciences