Lundberg Lars Etc. Software Quality Attributes and Trade-Offs

Blekinge Institute of Technology, June 2005, 101 p.Patrik Berander, Lars-Ola Damm, Jeanette Eriksson, Tony Gorschek, Kennet Henningsson, Per Jönsson, Simon Kågström, Drazen Milicic, Frans Mårtensson, Kari Rönkkö, Piotr Tomaszewski.Lars Lundberg, Michael Mattsson, Claes Wohlin.This compendium was produced in a Ph.D. course on “Quality attributes and trade-offs”. The 11 Ph.D. students that followed the course all worked on the same research project: BESQ (Blekinge Engineering Software Qualities).The goal of the course is to increase the competence in key areas related to engineering of software qualities and by this establish a common platform and understanding. The latter should, in the long run, make it easier to perform future cooperation and joint projects. We will also discuss techniques and criteria for reviewing scientific papers and book chapters. The course is divided into several sections, where one (or a group of) student(s) is responsible for each section. Each section should be documented in written form.This compendium is organized into 8 chapters:1. Software Quality Models and Philosophies, by D. Milicic.This chapter gives an overview of different quality models. It also discusses what quality is by presenting several high-profile quality gurus together with their thoughts on quality (which in some cases results in a more or less formal quality model).2. Customer/User-Oriented Attributes and Evaluation Models, by J. Eriksson, K. Rönkkö, S. Kågström.This chapter looks at the attributes of reliability, Usability, and Efficiency from a user perspective.3. Management-Oriented Attributes and Evaluation Models, by L-O. Damm.The software industry constantly seeks ways to optimize product development after what is expected from their customers. One effect of this is an increased need to become better at predicting and measuring management-related attributes that affect company success. This chapter describes a set of such management-related attributes and their relations and trade-offs.4. Developer-Oriented Quality Attributes and Evaluation Methods, by P. Jönsson.This chapter focuses on developer-oriented quality attributes, such as Maintainability, Reusability, Flexibility, and Demonstrability. A list of developer-oriented quality attributes is synthesized from several common quality models: McCall’s quality model, Boehm’s quality model, and ISO 9126-1.5. Merging Perspectives on Software Quality Attributes, by P. Berander.In the three previous chapters, various quality attributes are discussed from different perspectives. This chapter aims to merge these three different perspectives and discuss the relations between them.6. Decision Support and Trade-off Techniques, by T. Gorschek, K. Henningsson.Dealing with decisions concerning limited resources typically involves a trade-off of some sort. This chapter discusses the concept of trade-off techniques and practices as a basis for decision support. In this context, a trade-off can become a necessity if there are limited resources and two (or more) entities require the consumption of the same resource, or if two or more entities are in conflict.7. Trade-off examples inside software engineering and computer science, by F. Mårtensson.During software development, tradeoffs are made daily by the people participating in the development project. In this chapter, we will take a look at some of the methods that are available for structuring and quantifying the information necessary to make tradeoffs in some situations. We will concentrate on software development projects and look at four different examples where trade-off methods have been applied.8. Trade-off examples outside software engineering and computer science, by P. Tomaszewski.This chapter discusses the definition of tradeoffs and the difference between a trade-off and a break-through solution. The chapter also gives trade-off examples from the car industry, the power supply area, electronic media, and selling.