An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability

Abstract

Maintainability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. However, its management in practice is still problematic. Currently, there is no comprehensive basis for assessing and improving the maintainability of software systems. Quality models have been proposed to solve this problem. Nevertheless, existing approaches do not explicitly take into account the maintenance activities, that largely determine the software maintenance effort. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of maintainability that explicitly associates system properties with the activities carried out during maintenance. The separation of activities and properties facilitates the identification of sound quality criteria and allows to reason about their interdependencies. This transforms the quality model into a structured and comprehensive quality knowledge base that is usable in industrial project environments. For example, review guidelines can be generated from it. The model is based on an explicit quality metamodel that supports its systematic construction and fosters preciseness as well as completeness. An industrial case study demonstrates the applicability of the model for the evaluation of the maintainability of Matlab Simulink models that are frequently used in modelbased development of embedded systems.

Using evidential reasoning to make qualified predictions of software quality

“…Existing quality standards and other literature in the area tend to adopt the approach of starting from the high-level notion of quality and gradually decomposing it into more concrete notions that are individually more straightforward to understand and assess. When it comes to deciding what the specific factors are, and how they are related to each other, there is little agreement [3,7]. Accordingly, this question is left open in this paper.…”

“…The challenge of assessing maintainability has been the subject of an extensive amount of research by Diessenboeck and Wagner et al [3,10]. Maintainability is particularly difficult to assess because it can draw upon such a broad range of factors.…”

“…As discussed previously, software quality is intrinsically hierarchical [2,19,3,10]. Existing quality standards and other literature in the area tend to adopt the approach of starting from the high-level notion of quality and gradually decomposing it into more concrete notions that are individually more straightforward to understand and assess.…”

“…Boehm [2], Diessenboeck et al [3], ISO/IEC 9126 [4] (recently revised to ISO/IEC 25010 [5]). The problem is that there is no consensus on what shape these hierarchies should take, which is indicated by the sheer number of different quality models that abound.…”

A View-based Approach to Quality of Service Modelling in Service-oriented Enterprise Systems

“…As pointed out in [13], "this classification approach often lacks clear semantics regarding the relationship between super and subattributes". To eliminate this shortcoming, the so-called activity-based quality models, in which the quality is described along the activities performed on or with SOA system, were introduced in [14]. Although the activity-based approach was proposed to model software maintainability, it was also successfully applied to model SOA systems quality [1].…”