Software Quality Assessment Tool Based on Meta-Models

In the software industry it is indisputably essential to control the quality of produced software systems in terms of capabilities for easy maintenance, reuse, portability and others in order to ensure reliability in the software development. But it is also clear that it is very difficult to achieve such a control through a ‘manual’ management of quality. There are a number of approaches for software quality assurance based typically on software quality models (e.g. ISO 9126, McCall’s, Boehm’s and Dormey’s models) and software quality metrics (e.g. LOC, McCabe's cyclomatic complexity, Halstead's metric, Object-oriented metrics) for assessment of various quality characteristics. Since the appearance of the software quality assurance as a field in the software engineering, researchers have been looking for ways to automatically assess and manage the quality of the software systems. This paper presents a conceptual design of a comprehensive solution, referring to the automation of the software quality assessment process. The designed software tool allows the definition of software quality models, based on standards, and enable the setting of matching between criteria of a software quality model and appropriate software quality metrics. The automatic definition and application of software quality models and software quality metrics is based on relevant supported by the software tool meta-models proposed in the paper.