Reusing knowledge on software quality for developing measurement programs

In order develop high quality software, companies must understand what constitutes quality for their products and stakeholders and then manage and engineer quality accordingly. To support this, the measurement of software quality is essential. Various measurement approaches and quality models have been proposed for this, such as the ISO9126 standard, the models proposed by Boehm and McCall, or the GQM approach. The problem however is, that the application of these approaches implicitly assumes that the measurement personnel has experience in defining and measuring software quality, an assumption that is not true for many software companies. Therefore we propose to address this problem by supporting quality measurement with reuse of previously acquired knowledge. We gathered and organized quality measurement knowledge in a knowledge repository and designed a quality definition process that allows elicitation of quality requirements from multiple stakeholders.