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Here you can learn everything about the Quamoco quality model.

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Structure of the Quality Model

Here we give a brief overview of the structure of the quality model. Structure of the Quamoco Quality Model

The main concept of the quality model are Factors. A factor expresses a property of an entity. We describe with entities the things that are important for quality. Properties describe the attributes of the things we are interested in.

This concept of a factor is rather general. Thus, we use it on two levels of abstraction:

  1. Quality Aspects describe abstract quality goals defined for the whole product. In our quality model we use the "-ilities" of ISO 25010 as quality aspects. Typical examples for such quality aspects are Maintainability, Analysability, and Modifiability.
  2. Product Factors describe concrete, measurable properties of concrete entities. An example for a factor is the Complexity of a method, which can be measured by the cyclomatic complexity number, or by the nesting depth of the method.

To close the gap between abstract quality aspects and measurable product factors, we need to set the product factors in relation to the quality aspects. This is done via Impacts. An impact is either positive or negative and describes how the degree of presence or absence of a product factor influences a quality aspect.

A third layer in the levels of abstraction are Measures, which describe how a specify product factor can be quantified. To realize the connection to concrete tools in a quality assessment, we further introduce Instruments. An instrument describes a concrete implementation of a measure. For the example of the nesting depth, an instrument is the corresponding metric as implemented in the quality analysis framework ConQAT. This way, different tools can be used for a single measure.

In order to fully operationalize the quality model we need to specify aggregation formulas. They are called Evaluations and they are assigned to the factors in the quality model.