Building and Using Quality Models for Complex Software Domains

The use of quality models in software package procurement provides a framework for the description of the domain which the package belongs to. Package descriptions and user quality requirements may be translated into the quality concepts defined in the model making package procurement more efficient and reliable. In this paper we address the construction of quality models for complex software domains, defined as domains that imply a mixture of functionalities. Procurement processes taking place in complex domains require not a single package to be selected but a set of them. As a consequence, instead of a standard, single quality model, we need a more elaborated quality model for driving the simultaneous procurement of multiple software packages. We describe the parts that compose these kind of models, the methodology for building them and their usage in software procurement. We apply the approach to the complex domain of mail server systems.