An Industry Perspective to Comparing the SQALE and Quamoco Software Quality Models

Context: We investigate the different perceptions of quality provided by leading operational quality models when used to evaluate software systems from an industry perspective. Goal: To compare and evaluate the quality assessments of two competing quality models and to develop an extensible solution to meet the quality assurance measurement needs of an industry stakeholder -The Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL). Method: In cooperation with our industry partner TechLink, we operationalize the Quamoco quality model and employ a multiple case study design comparing the results of Quamoco and SQALE, two implementations of well known quality models. The study is conducted across current versions of several open source software projects sampled from GitHub and commercial software for sustainment management systems implemented in the C# language from our industry partner. Each project represents a separate embedded unit of study in a given context -open source or commercial. We employ inter-rater agreement and correlation analysis to compare the results of both models, focusing on Maintainability, Reliability, and Security assessments. Results: Our observations suggest that there is a significant disconnect between the assessments of quality under both quality models. Conclusion: In order to support industry adoption, additional work is required to bring competing implementations of quality models into alignment. This exploratory case study helps us shed light into this problem.