On the Use of Quality Models to Characterize Trustworthiness Properties

Abstract

Making informed choices when designing or contracting a system is yet a very challenging task. One of the biggest users’ concern is to select the most trustworthy solution. However, it is difficult to understand the trustworthiness of a system, because it encompasses a large diversity of properties such as security, privacy, performance, among others. Composing a measure that considers such a large number of properties, the relationship among them and their relevance in the composition requires a well defined model, such as a quality model. In this experience report, we study whether quality models can provide scores that are useful to characterize those properties, helping users to choose the most trustworthy of the available alternatives. Then, we have chosen a property that is on the top of users concerns: data privacy. Results showed a higher percentage of success of linkage attacks when the privacy score is lower, indicating the usefulness of quality models in measuring and improving data privacy and providing interesting insights to the users.