Development of a Unified Software Quality Platform in the Szeged InfoPólus Cluster

In Software Quality Assurance, system status reports are key to the stakeholders for controlling software quality. Although we may rely on a large number of low level measurements to this end, their interpretation and the way of connecting them to high level quality attributes is always a challenge. In this paper we report on a complex project involving industrial partners whose aim is the development of a unified software quality platform that deals with and bridges these low and high level quality aspects, and provides a basis for the industrial applications of the approach. The project is implemented by a consortium of software industry members of the Szeged Software Innovation Pole Cluster and associated researchers with the support from the EU co-financed national grant promoting innovation clusters of small and middle-sized enterprises. The approach to the unified quality platform is based on the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm and a supporting software infrastructure, and its novelty lies in a unified representation of the low level metrics and the high level questions that evaluate them to address software quality assurance goals. It allows the definition of various complex questions involving different types of metrics, while the supporting framework enables the automatic collection of the metrics and the calculation of the answers to the questions. We present details about the design and development of the quality platform and its relation to the applications that are being developed by the industrial members of the consortium.