Understanding the relations between software quality attributes-a survey approach

Abstract

Software quality is a complex concept containing a large number of quality attributes. These attributes often have different meaning for different people and different attributes are not of equal importance. Moreover, the actual relations between the attributes are mostly poorly understood. Companies have to cope with these relations in their daily software development. On the one hand, companies take management decisions based on experience. On the other hand, researchers address software quality too. However, the two views are not necessarily the same.To increase the understanding of software quality attributes and their relations, two surveys have been conducted. The first survey focuses on the research literature and the second is an interview survey with people from industry. From these surveys, it is concluded that there is an agreement, in qualitative terms, that quality attributes are dependent. However, different opinions exist about the actual relations. No quantitative relations have been found. The main conclusion is that there is a gap between research literature that poses mostly generic relations between quality attributes and the tacit knowledge in industry. The tacit knowledge within industry is largely focused on system specific relations between quality attributes. The result from these surveys provides a compilation of relations between quality attributes that illustrates the gap between the views in industry and academia respectively. The understanding of the gap is the first step towards bringing the two views closer to each other.