Quality-Driven Database System Development

Background

As a software system is a kind of a product which is developed in a production process, therefore its quality may be considered in two perspectives: the product quality and the development process quality. The perspectives are strongly interrelated, for example, in shipbuilding industry, which is a more matured discipline compared to software engineering; the controlled quality over the design and building process is necessary to guarantee the quality of a ship – the final product. In software engineering, the quality of software development process also influences positively on the quality of a software product but does not guarantee the expected quality of the product. The software development process may be considered as a sequence of activities that deliver different artifacts. At the beginning of the process, software requirements are defined (usually on the basis of the business model). At the end a final software product is delivered. Other activities deliver intermediate artifacts. The quality of the intermediate artifacts influence the quality of the final software product. The chapter abstracts from the quality of the software development process, and concentrates on the quality of the software product and its relationship to the quality of the intermediate artifacts.

How to get high quality software becomes a more and more important question today. The question concerns two subquestions: how to develop software and how to control quality within the development process.

Furthermore, we consider MDA as a modern approach to the development of software systems.

OMG document (Miller & Mukerji, 2003) describes MDA as an approach to system “development…[that]… provides a means for using models to direct the course of understanding, design, construction, deployment, operation, maintenance and modification.”