Software Quality

Software products have requirements on software quality attributes such as safety and performance. Development teams use various specific techniques to achieve these quality requirements. We call these ‘‘Quality Attribute Techniques’’ (QATs). QATs are used to identify, analyse and control potential product quality problems. Although QATs are widely used in practice, there is no systematic approach to represent, select, and integrate them in existing approaches to software process modelling and tailoring. This research aims to provide a systematic approach to better select and integrate QATs into tailored software process models for projects that develop products with specific product quality requirements.

A selection method is developed to support the choice of appropriate techniques for any quality attribute, across the lifecycle. The selection method is based on three perspectives:

• (1) risk management;

• (2) process integration; and

• (3) cost/benefit using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).

The case study demonstrates that the selection method provides a more methodological an effective approach to choose QATs for projects that target a specific quality attribute, compared to the ad hoc selection performed by development teams. The proposed selection method can be used to systematically choose QATs for projects to target specific product qualities throughout the software development lifecycle.

More details can be found in the following publication:

• Chiam, Yin Kia, Mark Staples, Xin Ye, and Liming Zhu. "Applying a selection method to choose Quality Attribute Techniques." Information and Software Technology 55, no. 8 (2013): 1419-1436. [Link] [pdf]

The goal of this research project is to develop a tool supported methodology that would facilitate the evaluation and assessment of a software product's quality according to ISO/IEC-25010 software engineering quality standard.

In this research, a quality assessment method is proposed based on the latest software quality standard ISO/IEC 25010. ASQuS (Assessing Software Quality using Source code) method is designed based on two perspectives (structural and rule violation-based quality measure metrics) to analyze four quality characteristics defined by software quality standard ISO/IEC25010 (i.e., performance, security, maintainability and reliability). A Software Quality Assessment Tool (SQAT) is developed to demonstrate how ASQuS method track defects and monitor software quality in the source codes.

The mapping between quality characteristics and quality rule set,rule and issue used in this research is available here.

More details can be found in the following publication:

• Sepehr Forouzani, Yin Kia Chiam, and Soroush Forouzani. 2016. Method for Assessing Software Quality Using Source Code Analysis. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Network, Communication and Computing (ICNCC '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 166-170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3033288.3033316 [Link] [pdf]