MVSQR Projrct: Study of Measurement and Visualization of Software Quality Requirements

Visualization for software quality requirements from macro viewpoint

Project Outline

It is not easy to define quality requirements in the early stage of software system development, because stakeholders cannot easily identify, prioritize and quantify them long before the system is available.
In addition, even if they are defined at that stage, it is also difficult to trace the quality requirements smoothly along a stepwise software development process through design and implementation. Without guaranteeing the traceability, however, quality requirements can only be met at optimization or modification at the very last stage of development, through reengineering a lower-quality implementation, which often entails more effort and a later release than designing a high quality system in terms of performance, security, and other aspects.
In light of the background described above, in this project, we will quantitatively analyze and assess a spectrum of quality requirements in a software engineering artifact, such as design requirement, code and test case, and design and implement the methods and tools to visualize such quantified quality factors to enable designers, programmers and requirement analysts to easily understand.
Outline of the method is shown in a figure below. Each artifact is put through the Software Spectrum Analyzer and measurements are made of the quality characteristics and their importance, as reflected in the artifact. Based on the measurement results, a visualization policy is prepared through methods such as use of color. Applying this visualization policy to the original artifact for its visualization helps designers and programmers intuitively confirm whether the quality requirements are being properly met or not.
We believe that this development method will mitigate the problems characterized above through user-friendly tool support.

Major partner organizations and members

The Open University, UK : Yijun Yu
The Open University, UK : Bashar Nuseibeh
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan : Motoshi Saeki
Shinshu University：Haruhiko Kaiya(Contact Person)

Links

Comments are closed.