Uma abordagem para avaliação da qualidade de artefatos de software

Abstract

While applications and software systems have evolved and becoming more complex, mainly due to the increasing demands of customers and users, organizations that produce or acquire have sought alternatives to reduce costs and deliveries without affect the final product quality. However, in order to make the evaluation of these products more effective, it is important to use a quality model that allows structure it in a way that satisfies, among other requirements, the heterogeneous expectations of stakeholders. At same time, it is recommended starting this evaluation as soon as possible since the early stages of a development process in order to detect and fix any problems before they propagate. In this sense, this work presents a study on quality models used in the evaluation of software products, proposing at the same time the assessment of software artifacts, generated and/or transformed by activities throughout the lifecycle of a software process. The proposal is based on a quality framework, structured from a metamodel, which relates the process of evaluating the several characteristics that involve the artifacts, such as their purposes, stakeholders, methods and corresponding metrics. The work is also composed by a supporting tool which purpose is to guide evaluators in defining a plan for assessing the quality of those artifacts. Finally, the proposal was submitted to validation through a case study involving graduate students of Federal University of Santa Maria.