CQA-ENV: An Integrated Environment for the Continuous Quality Assessment of Software Artifacts

• Authors: Damiano Torre;Belen Blasco;Marcela Genero;Mario Piattini
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 conference on New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques: Proceedings of the Eighth SoMeT_09
• Year: 2009

At present, the quality of software artefacts is an increasing concern for software development organizations. It is widely acknowledged that the quality of the software product that is finally implemented is influenced to an enormous extent by the quality of software artefacts (commonly models) that are produced throughout the software development process. Quality assessment and assurance techniques must therefore be applied from the early development stages onwards. The quality of the models is gaining even more relevance with the appearance of the Model Driven Development Model paradigm, which consists in the production of software as successive transformations of models. Although some methodologies for evaluating the quality of software artefacts do exist, all of them are isolated proposals, which focus on specific artefacts and apply specific assessment techniques. There is no generic and flexible methodology that allows the quality assessment of any kind of software artefact, regardless of type, much less a tool that supports it. When tackling this problem in this paper, we propose an integrated environment called “CQA-ENV”, consisting of a) Methodology for the continuous quality assessment of software artefacts, based on the ISO 14598 standard and other relevant proposals, 2) A set of tools that supports such methodology, which is composed of a vertical tool (CQA-Tool) that supports the methodology, along with several specific tools for the assessment of the different software artefacts. Current evaluation tools will also be able to be plugged into this generic tool. Moreover, the CQA-Tool provides a capacity for building a catalogue of assessment techniques that integrates available assessment techniques (e.g. metrics, checklists, modelling conventions, guidelines, etc.) for each software artefact. CQA-ENV can also be used by companies that offer software quality assessment services, especially for clients who are software development organisations, outsourcing software construction, thus obtaining an independent quality evaluation of the software products they acquire. Software development organisations that perform their own evaluation will be able to use it as well.