Assessing Quality

Abstract

One of the least understood aspects of situational method engineering is quality assessment. Here, we are concerned firstly about the quality of individual method parts (fragments, chunks, components) as they are stored in the method base, the overall quality of the method base itself in terms primarily of cohesion and the quality of the method that is constructed from these parts, extracted from the method base. This last concern has two aspects: (1) whether the overall method is cohesive and complete (i.e., it is a full method and not just a partial method) and that it contains no unrequired elements such as work products created but not used nor has any missing method elements; and (2) whether the constructed process is the right one for the industry application for which it is targeted. The quality of all these can be assessed statically. There is an additional, dynamical, quality concern: how well the method works in practice. Each of these aspects is covered in the succeeding subsections of this chapter, starting with a discussion of a framework into which all these aspects fit.