Towards an Ontology for Software Product Quality Attributes

Ahmad Kayed, Nael Hirzalla
College of Computing
Fahad Bin Sultan Univ.
Tabuk, KSA
kayed@fbsc.edu.sa

Ahmad A. Samhan, Mohammed Alfayoumi
College of IT
Middle East University for Graduate Studies
Amman, Jordan
nhirzallah@fbsc.edu.sa
Abstract—Recently, Quality Assurance concept has been
developed increasingly to be included in many of our life
existing fields; financial, industrial, trading, computing, etc.
Software Quality Product Attributes (SWQAs) have been
created as a matter of applying the QA concept on the results
of web or desktop application development process, to fit the
products with the organizational and global market standards
and goals, and to provide it with a competitive advantage
value. Web application or software product quality is
composed of many attributes such as portability, usability,
reliability, modularity. During the recent years, many
researchers discussed and presented software attributes in
their works which showed that till now there is a lack of
consensus on the semantic of many of concepts and
terminologies used in this field. Our work is focusing on
studying Software Product Quality Attributes concepts and
terminologies. We conduct several experiments to extract the
main concepts for SWQAs. The results show that there is a
number of concepts that are frequently used to describe these
attributes. Summarizing and formalizing the semantic of the
attributes into these concepts presents a common
understanding and agreement on the semantic of SWQPAs
which can be used by software engineers, researchers,
practitioners, and stakeholders.
Keywords- Web application quality, ontology, software
product quality, terminologies
I. INTRODUCTION
Software quality attributes and measures are one of the
key issues that made significant influences on software
engineering; it plays a very important role in evaluating
software programs or web applications. It is considered by
practitioners and researchers to be the key factor for
producing high quality competitive web or desktop
applications to the markets, which is enforced by the
appearance of quality assurance issues. As a matter of fact,
many initiatives such as IEEE Standard Releases, ISO/IEC
Releases, SPICE (Software Process Improvement and
Capability Determination), and many quality models, such as
McCall quality model, Boehm quality model, Dromey
quality model, and others, consider software quality
measures and attributes to be an important element of
reaching a higher maturity levels and managing the quality
of software programs [1, 2].
During the last decades, many developments in many
fields have affected how the business is done. One of the
most important issue that was revealed is the emerging of the
internet and the globalization effect on the individuals and
the organizations business processes. It created a need for
sharing information and resources widely as a matter of
collaboration to compete efficiently in the market. In order to
achieve this collaboration, standards are created to provide
agreed concepts and practices that make participants avoid
inconsistencies in their business [1]. Researchers in this
domain explained that there is no single standard that covers
the area of software measurements in its totality, but rather,
there are many different standards focus on specific areas,
without considering a comprehensive framework, [3].
Recently, a lot of efforts from researchers and institutes
are done to manipulate the symptoms that software quality
measurements discipline suffers from; software quality
measures concepts, principles, and terminologies are
considered by those researchers and institutes to be in a stage
that they are still being defined, consolidated, and agreed
upon [1].
In this paper, ontology is used to reach an understandable
unified semantic framework for web or desktop application
quality measurements that their concepts and terminologies
are inconsistency among the current studies and reports. In
this work we studied and analyzed a total of 80 different
documents, reports, and proposals concerned with software
measures, attributes and quality. The first step was to
exclude documents, reports or proposals that included more
than 80% programming code, having weak relevancy to
software quality versus general quality, or can be classified
as redundant information. This process, which is more
detailed and justified in [4], reduced the total number from
80 to a total of 34 documents, reports, and proposals. Then
we extract various concepts, definitions, and terminologies
from them. Our claim is that the semantic of these definitions
can be condensed into a smaller set of concepts. If these
concepts have enough and clear semantic, then they will
achieve a common understanding for any other web
application quality attributes.
This paper also provides a brief introduction to Ontology
and some of its practical usage which appears in section two.
Section three talks about our experiment where well-known
Software Product Quality Attributes are selected, defined,
2009 Fourth International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services
978-0-7695-3613-2/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICIW.2009.36
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