Quality Modeling for Software Product Lines

In today's embedded software systems development, non-functional requirements (e.g., dependability, maintainability) are becoming more and more important. Simultaneously the increasing pressure to develop software in less time and at lower costs pushes software industry towards product line’s solutions. To support product lines for high quality embedded software, quality models are needed. In this paper, we investigate to which extent existing quality modeling approaches facilitate high quality software product lines. First, we define several requirements for an appropriate quality model. Then, we use those requirements to review the existing quality modeling approaches. We conclude from the review that no single quality model fulfills all of our requirements. However, several approaches contain valuable characteristics. Based upon those characteristics, we propose the Prometheus approach. Prometheus is a goal-oriented method that integrates quantitative and qualitative approaches to quality control. The method starts quality modeling early in the software lifecycle and is reusable across product lines.