SQuAP-Ont: an Ontology of Software Quality Relational Factors from Financial Systems
This work addresses the need for formalized relational analysis in software engineering, specifically for financial systems, but is incremental as it builds on existing SQuAP and ISO standards.
The paper tackles the lack of formal study of interactions between software quality, architecture, and process as defined by ISO standards by introducing SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology that formalizes 28 relational factors from the SQuAP model for banking systems to enable representation and reasoning via Linked Data.
Quality, architecture, and process are considered the keystones of software engineering. ISO defines them in three separate standards. However, their interaction has been scarcely studied, so far. The SQuAP model (Software Quality, Architecture, Process) describes twenty-eight main factors that impact on software quality in banking systems, and each factor is described as a relation among some characteristics from the three ISO standards. Hence, SQuAP makes such relations emerge rigorously, although informally. In this paper, we present SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology designed by following a well-established methodology based on the re-use of Ontology Design Patterns (i.e. ODPs). SQuAP-Ont formalises the relations emerging from SQuAP to represent and reason via Linked Data about software engineering in a three-dimensional model consisting of quality, architecture, and process ISO characteristics.