A unifying model for software quality

Assuring high quality of software is crucial, but a highly complex topic. It is intermingled with most disciplines of software engineering, which have developed their own quality assurance approaches. However, they lack a common foundation, which leads to loss of information between the disciplines and requires additional tracking effort. There is no comprehensive framework to describe all different concepts relating to software quality in a common way. In this paper we present a general quality model, providing the possibility to describe very different concepts related to quality. We show that our quality model is able to integrate the various concepts found in standards, quality models, guidelines, and static code checker rules. Furthermore, we show that the quality model is able to describe the interrelations of disciplines, like requirements engineering and software test, to software quality. With this quality model, we provide a common foundation for concepts related to software quality, enabling consistency and continuity of quality-related information during software development.