OntoQAI: An Ontology to Support Quality Assurance Inspections

Abstract

According to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), the purpose of Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA) is to provide staff and management with objective insights about processes and their associated work products. Such purpose is usually achieved through the implementation of software inspections. Although software inspection be a common practice, it is time-consuming and expensive, which turns the implementation in small and medium-sized teams infeasible. To improve the software inspection, this paper proposes a domain ontology for representing the concepts of quality assurance inspection, which is independent, extensive, shareable and semantically strong. Through the ontology it is possible to provide a formal structure to support the development of software engineering solutions with quality. To support the quality assurance inspections, we developed an agent-based prototype that encapsulates the ontology model. The prototype is able to generate inspection checklists and automatically allocate noncompliance issues. We validated the approach through a case study that shows an increase of inspection coverage and adherence of process.