Software quality models : purposes, usage scenarios and requirements

Software quality models are a well-accepted means to support quality management of software systems. Over the last 30 years, a multitude of quality models have been proposed and applied with varying degrees of success. Despite successes and standardisation efforts, quality models are still being criticised, as their application in practice exhibits various problems. To some extent, this criticism is caused by an unclear definition of what quality models are and which purposes they serve. Beyond this, there is a lack of explicitly stated requirements for quality models with respect to their intended mode of application. To remedy this, this paper describes purposes and usage scenarios of quality models and, based on the literature and experiences from the authors, collects critique of existing models. From this, general requirements for quality models are derived. The requirements can be used to support the evaluation of existing quality models for a given context or to guide further quality model development

How

to effectively define and measure maintainabilit

Concise and consistent naming

Approximately 70 % of the source code of a software system consists of identifiers. Hence, the names chosen as identifiers are of paramount importance for the readability of computer programs and therewith their comprehensibility. However, virtually every programming language allows programmers to use almost arbitrary sequences of characters as identifiers which far too often results in more or less meaningless or even misleading naming. Coding style guides address this problem but are usually limited to general and hard to enforce rules like “identifiers should be self-describing”. This paper renders adequate identifier naming far more precisely. A formal model, based on bijective mappings between concepts and names, provides a solid foundation for the definition of precise rules for concise and consistent naming. The enforcement of these rules is supported by a tool that incrementally builds and maintains a complete identifier dictionary while the system is being developed. The identifier dictionary explains the language used in the software system, aids in consistent naming, and improves productivity of programmers by proposing suitable names depending on the current context

Eine Forschungsagenda für Softwarequalität

Softwarequalität ist für die Praxis, gerade in einem Technologiestandort wie Deutschland, eine große Chance aber auch eine enorme Herausforderung. Qualitätsfragen haben einen starken wirtschaftlichen Einfluß, aber durch die Komplexität und Vielschichtigkeit von Qualität sind sie schwer greifbar. Diese Papier stellt das Ergebnis der Diskussionen von Qualitätsexperten aus Forschung und Praxis dar, welche Fragestellungen in der Zukunft am dringlichsten im Bereich der Softwarequalität bearbeitet werden müssen, damit sowohl der Stand der Forschung als auch der Technik entscheidend verbessert werden kann