Artifact Quality Assessment Plans Generation from Tailored Processes

Abstract

The production of quality software is a basic and essential Software Engineering goal. A software product quality assessment should be started at the early stages of a development process, to detect and correct problems before they propagate, making their correction more expensive. For that to be possible, it is necessary to assess the quality of each artifact generated during the development process, to allow the production of defect-free artifacts improving the final product quality. In this work, we propose an approach for the generation of quality plans during the tailoring of software process. When the user selects the quality practices to be used in a project, a set of activities satisfying those practices are inserted in the project's software process, along with their associated artifacts. Our goal is to define the quality assessment plans for these artifacts. The approach was validated through case studies of real projects in different companies, involving experts with large software development experience. The interviewees analyzed the approach and considered the proposal of this work as positive because it facilitates the definition of assessment plans, the plans are adequate to the selected criteria and that quality control during the process decreases rework.