3MQM: A maturity model for model-based quality management

Managing product quality during the development, operation, and maintenance of software-intensive systems is a challenging task. Although many organizations use quality models to define, control, measure, or improve different quality aspects of their development artifacts, only very little guidance is available on how to assess the maturity of an organization with respect to model-based quality management (MQM). Thus, it is difficult for an organization to improve its usage of quality models. Existing process maturity models such as CMMI or SPICE are too generic to provide specific guidance for the improvement of MQM. This paper presents a Maturity Model for Model-based Quality Management (3MQM) as a first step towards better support for determining the maturity of current MQM and for identifying improvement possibilities with respect to MQM. The model can be applied to provide an integrated overview of the maturity of an organization with respect to the usage of quality models.