Comprehensive Landscapes for Software-related Quality Models

Managing quality (such as service availability or process adherence) during the development, operation, and maintenance of software(-intensive) systems and services is a challenging task. Although many organizations need to define, control, measure, and improve various quality aspects of their development artifacts and processes, nearly no guidance is available on how to select, adapt, define, combine, use, and evolve quality models. Catalogs of quality models as well as selection and tailoring processes are widely missing. One essential reason for this tremendous lack of support is that software development is a highly context-dependent process. Therefore, quality models always need to be adaptable to the respective project goals and contexts. A first step towards better support for selecting and adapting quality models can be seen in a classification of existing quality models, especially with respect to their suitability for different purposes and contexts. Such a classification of quality models can be applied to provide an integrated overview of the variety of quality models. This article presents the idea of so called comprehensive quality model landscapes (CQMLs), which provide a classification scheme for quality models and help to get an overview of existing quality models and their relationships. The article describes the usage goals for such landscapes, presents a classification scheme, presents the initial concept of such landscapes, illustrates the concept with selected examples, and sketches open questions and future work.