SQuAP-Ont: an Ontology of Software Quality Relational Factors from Financial Systems

Quality, architecture, and process are considered the keystones of software engineering. ISO defines them in three separate standards. However, their interaction has been scarcely studied, so far. The SQuAP model (Software Quality, Architecture, Process) describes twenty-eight main factors that impact on software quality in banking systems, and each factor is described as a relation among some characteristics from the three ISO standards. Hence, SQuAP makes such relations emerge rigorously, although informally. In this paper, we present SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology designed by following a well-established methodology based on the reuse of Ontology Design Patterns (i.e. SQuAP-Ont formalises the relations emerging from SQuAP to represent and reason via Linked Data about software engineering in a three-dimensional model consisting of quality, architecture, and process ISO characteristics. Industrial standards are widely used in the software engineering practice: they are built on preexisting literature and provide a common ground to scholars and practitioners to analyze, develop, and assess software systems. As far as software quality is concerned, the reference standard is the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 (ISO quality from now on), which defines the quality of software products and their usage (i.e., in-use quality). The ISO quality standard introduces eight characteristics that qualify a software product, and five characteristics that assess its quality in use. A characteristic is a parameter for measuring the quality of a software system-related aspect, e.g., reliability, usability, performance efficiency. The quantitative value associated with a characteristic is measured employing metrics that are dependent on the context of a specific software project and defined following the established literature.