International Journal on Advances in Software, vol 4 no 1 & 2, year 2011, http://www.iariajournals.org/software/ 76 Contextual Injection of Quality Measures into Software Engineering Processes Gregor Grambow and Roy Oberhauser Manfred Reichert Computer Science Dept. Institute for Databases and Information Systems Aalen University, Germany Ulm University, Germany {gregor.grambow, roy.oberhauser}@htw-aalen.de
[email protected] Abstract—Despite improvements in software engineering process (e.g., junior vs. senior engineers, information needs), processes and tools, concrete preventative and analytical activity coordination with the overall team process, the software quality assurance activities are still typically contextual and project influences on the processes (e.g., manually triggered and determined, resulting in missed or schedule, resource availability), and software quality untimely quality opportunities and increased project overhead. assurance (SQA) dependencies (e.g., quality plan, reactive Quality goals, when defined, lack holistic environmental quality measures, metric dependencies). support for automated performance measurement and Historically software development projects have also governance that is tightly integrated in the low-level faced difficulties in meeting budget, schedule, functionality, operational software engineering processes. This results in and quality targets [6][7][8]. A more recent study in 2002 by higher quality risks and cost risks. Based on adaptive process the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) management, an approach is presented that injects situationally-determined quality measure proposals into the found that most delivered software products are still stricken concrete workflows of software engineers, using contextual by bugs and defects [9]. While some of these difficulties semantic knowledge and multi-agent quality goal tracking and might be ascribed to a misaligned planning environment in decision-making.