Software Quality Modeling And Analysis Based On HASARD

Quality is a fundamental concept in the development and maintenance of software and information systems. It is also a complex and elusive concept. How to provide high-quality software is a very important topic in the field of computer software all along. A large amount of research has been done on software quality models for understanding, measuring and predicting qualities of software and information systems. An appropriate model of software quality may have great effect on the development and evaluation of software systems. Existing work in the literature on software quality falls into two categories: quality models and their construction methods.Based on the analysis of existing works on constructing quality models, a systematic method was proposed in [1] for constructing quality models of information systems. It devised a diagrammatic notation to represent quality models that enclose application specific features. The method adapted the techniques of hazard analysis for the development and deployment of safety related systems for deriving quality models from system architectural designs. The quality model is then analyzed to identify the potential problems in the architectural design of the software that may occur during the development and maintenance of the system. Such knowledge can help developers to address quality problem through improving and changing their design at a relatively early stage of system development.Based on the above work, this thesis reports the construction of a case tool that supports the method. The main contributions of the thesis are:(1) The design and implementation of a prototype CASE tool SQUARE of software quality modeling and analysis. It supports the quality modeling and quality model analysis activities of the HASARD method. The tool includes the following modules. (1) Software architecture modeling. This module supports construction of software architecture models represented in a diagrammatic notation through graphical user interface. (2) Hazard analysis. This module supports the analysis of software architectural models using SFMEA method. (3) Quality modeling. This module supports the construction and modification of software quality models represented in the diagrammatic notation using HASARD method. (4) Analysis of quality models. This module consists of several analysis tools to analyze the quality model to identify potential quality problems and quality related features of the design system. (5) Project management. This module supports the management of the set of various diagrams of the projects of software architectural modeling and quality analysis, which include architecture diagrams, quality model diagrams, and a collection of diagrams generated by the analysis tool as the results of quality analysis.(2) A case study of an E-Commerce software system, which is an online trading of medicine. It demonstrated the expressiveness of the quality modeling language and the usability of HASARD and SQUARE in guiding software design and implementation.