Model-based Product Quality Evaluation with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

The ability to develop or evolve software or software-based systems/services with defined and guaranteed quality in a predictable way is becoming increasingly important. Essential though not exclusive prerequisites for this are the ability to model the relevant quality properties appropriately and the capability to perform reliable quality evaluations. Existing approaches for integrated quality modeling and evaluation are typically either narrowly focused or too generic and have proprietary ways for modeling and evaluating quality. This article sketches an approach for modeling and evaluating quality properties in a uniform way, without losing the ability to build sufficiently detailed customized models for specific quality properties. The focus of this article is on the description of a multi-criteria aggregation mechanism that can be used for the evaluation. In addition, the underlying quality meta-model, an example application scenario, related work, initial application results, and an outlook on future research are presented.