Analysis of Software Evolvability in Quality Models

For long-lived systems, there is a need to address evolvability explicitly. For this purpose, we have in our earlier work developed a software evolvability framework based on industrial case studies. With this as input in this paper we analyze several existing quality models for the purpose of evaluating how software evolvability is addressed in these models. The goal of the analysis is to investigate if the elements of the evolvability framework can be systematically managed or integrated into different existing quality models. Our conclusion is that although none of the existing quality models is dedicated to the analysis of software evolvability, we can enrich respective quality model through integrating the missing elements, and adapt each quality model for software evolvability analysis purpose.