Formalising Software Quality Using a Hierarchy of Quality Models

The success of any activity relies on its quality. There are many approaches to quality assessment and management related to software activities like specification, modelling and design of all kind of artifacts (from large systems to small Java applets, from custom -made applications to commercial software). Unfortunately, these approaches are difficult to compare, combine or select because of the lack of a wi despread quality reference framework. In this paper we propose three kinds of hierarchically structured quality models in order to formalise software quality issues and deal with quality information modelling. A generic model that represents the fundamental concepts related to software quality is the root of this hierarchy. Starting from this generic model, many reference models that specialise it may be derived. Finally, reference models are refined into domain models that adapt them to a particular domain of software. In the paper, we define as example a reference model that adopts the ISO/IEC 9126-1 quality standard, classical proposals about metrics and the quality-related QML language. We then refine this model into three different domain models, for a kind of component libraries, databases and web services.