A Semiotic Approach to Quality in Specifications of Software Measures

Each software entity should have as high quality as possible in the context of limited resources. A specification of a software quality measure is a kind of software entity. Existing studies about the evaluation of software measures do not pay enough attention to the quality of specifications of measures. Semiotics has been used as a basis in order to evaluate the quality of different types of software entities. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional, semiotic quality framework of specifications of software quality measures. We apply this framework in order to evaluate the syntactic and semantic quality of two sets of specifications of database design measures. The evaluation shows that these specifications have some quality problems.