Reporting an experience on the establishment of a quality model for systems-of-systems

Abstract

Currently, Systems-of-Systems (SoS) have performed an important role in diverse application domains, with representative examples in airport, military, and smart-cities, including crisis/emergency management. SoS refer to complex software-intensive systems, resulted from interoperability of independent constituent systems, performing new missions that could not be performed by any constituents working separately. For these critical systems, their quality is undoubtedly essential. However, in general, there is a lack of studies that discuss how quality has been addressed in such systems. The main contribution of this paper is to present an experience of establishing a quality model (i.e., a set of quality characteristics/attributes, subcharacteristics, and metrics) for SoS, in particular, for the crisis/emergent management domain. This quality model is based on ISO/IEC 25010 and it has also proved to be an important support to evaluate a system of this domain, however their construction must be performed with caution. Experience such as presented in this work could be repeated in other domains, contributing to improve the quality of a diversity of critical, complex SoS that are currently being built.