Strategy to improve quality for software applications: a process view

Abstract

Each organization devoted to developing software/web applications should have as one of its ultimate goals to improve the quality in use of its products. In order to accomplish this, first it has to understand the quality of the current product version and then make appropriate changes to increase the quality of the new version if improvement actions were needed. For this purpose, we have developed a specific strategy called SIQinU (Strategy for understanding and Improving Quality in Use), which allows recognizing problems of quality in use through evaluation and proposes product improvements by understanding and making changes on product attributes. Hence by re-evaluating quality in use of the new version, improvement gains can be gauged. SIQinU is in alignment with GOCAME (Goal-Oriented Context-Aware Measurement and Evaluation), a multi-purpose generic strategy previously developed for measurement and evaluation which relies on: a conceptual framework (with ontological base), a process, and methods and tools. Since the process aspect is paramount in defining SIQinU - given the amount of phases and activities - in this paper we model the functional and behavioral process views illustrating them with excerpts of a real case study.