Software Quality Assurance by means of Methodologies, Measurements and Knowledge Management Issues
Résumé
Software quality assurance has emerged in the past years for the market and academia as a better solution to achieve customer satisfaction. Organizations recognize that it is only by offering better quality products that they can have an edge over their competitors and thus they can ensure customer loyalty. In this context, researchers on software quality have proposed methodologies, techniques and different approaches to support this activity and its effective use in industry. This report presents a piece of research conducted in this direction. Methodologies and measurements were defined and applied to support the assessment of software processes and products for different types of systems (e.g. web applications, information systems, ubiquitous systems, legacy systems). Knowledge management issues were also explored for the organization of knowledge with ontologies; capture and dissemination of lessons learned in projects to support software quality improvement. The experience and results obtained with this research conducted to the definition of new research perspectives. The first research perspective aims at defining new approaches for quality evaluation based on measurements for interactive systems (in particular for the predictive evaluation of usability and the quality evaluation of ubiquitous systems). The second one aims at exploring knowledge management concepts for the benefit of the quality evaluation activity itself, considering that software quality assurance is a knowledge-rich activity including explicit documented knowledge in standards, quality measurements and techniques, as well as tacit knowledge of each individual that participates in the quality evaluation process (evaluators, users and other stakeholders). In this way, all this research contributes to the introduction of practical software quality assurance procedures throughout the software processes to enable their real adoption by organizations.
