A research review of quality assessment for software

Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness

Requirements engineering: a review and research agenda

This paper reviews the area of requirements engineering. It outlines the key concerns to which attention should be devoted by both practitioners, who wish to "reengineer" their development processes, and academics, seeking intellectual challenges. It presents an assessment of the state-of-the-art and draws conclusions in the form of a research agenda

An Analysis of Early Software Reliability Improvement Techniques

This research explores early life cycle software reliability prediction models or techniques to predict the reliability of software prior to writing code, and a method for increasing or improving the reliability of software products early in the development life cycle. Five prediction models and two development techniques are examined. Each model is statically analyzed in terms of availability of data early in the life cycle, ease of data collection, and whether data is currently collected. One model and the two techniques satisfied those requirements and are further analyzed for their ability to predict or improve software reliability. While the researchers offer no significant statistical results of the model\u27s ability to predict software reliability, important conclusions are drawn about the cost and time savings of using inspections as a means of improving software reliability. The results indicate that the current software development paradigm needs to be changed to use the Cleanroom Software Development Process for fixture software development. This proactive approach to developing reliable software saves development and testing costs. One obvious benefit of this research is that cost savings realized earlier in the software development cycle have a dramatic effect on making software development practices better and more efficient

A software testing estimation and process control model

The control of the testing process and estimation of the resource required to perform testing is key to delivering a software product of target quality on budget. This thesis explores the use of testing to remove errors, the part that metrics and models play in this process, and considers an original method for improving the quality of a software product. The thesis investigates the possibility of using software metrics to estimate the testing resource required to deliver a product of target quality into deployment and also determine during the testing phases the correct point in time to proceed to the next testing phase in the life-cycle. Along with the metrics Clear ratio. Chum, Error rate halving. Severity shift, and faults per week, a new metric 'Earliest Visibility' is defined and used to control the testing process. EV is constructed upon the link between the point at which an error is made within development and subsequently found during testing. To increase the effectiveness of testing and reduce costs, whilst maintaining quality the model operates by each test phase being targeted at the errors linked to that test phase and the ability for each test phase to build upon the previous phase. EV also provides a measure of testing effectiveness and fault introduction rate by development phase. The resource estimation model is based on a gradual refinement of an estimate, which is updated following each development phase as more reliable data is available. Used in conjunction with the process control model, which will ensure the correct testing phase is in operation, the estimation model will have accurate data for each testing phase as input. The proposed model and metrics have been developed and tested on a large-scale (4 million LOC) industrial telecommunications product written in C and C++ running within a Unix environment. It should be possible to extend this work to suit other environments and other development life-cycles

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

A survey on online monitoring approaches of computer-based systems

This report surveys forms of online data collection that are in current use (as well as being the subject of research to adapt them to changing technology and demands), and can be used as inputs to assessment of dependability and resilience, although they are not primarily meant for this use