Fostering software quality assessment

Abstract

Software quality assessment shall monitor and guide the evolution of a system based on quality measurements. This continuous process should ideally involve multiple stakeholders and provide adequate information for each of them to use. We want to support an effective selection of quality measurements based on the type of software and individual information needs of the involved stakeholders. We propose an approach that brings together quality measurements and individual information needs for a context-sensitive tailoring of information related to a software quality assessment. We address the following research question: How can we better support different stakeholders in the quality assessment of a software system? For that we will devise theories, models, and prototypes to capture their individual information needs, tailor information from software repositories to these needs, and enable a contextual analysis of the quality aspects. Such a context-sensitive tailoring will provide a effective and individual view on the latest development trends in a project. We outline the milestones as well as evaluation approaches in this paper.