Towards Managing Understandability of Q...

Establishing common understanding between the parties in the software process is important for dealing with quality of the prospective software. This process is difficult to organize because the parties (especially, developers and business stakeholders) perceive quality based on different world views. To address this problem, we aim at a solution for managing understandability of quality-related information in the software process. This solution provides the set of understandability assessment activities (aimed at diagnosing problems with communicated terms not belonging to the view of the target party) and understandability improvement activities (aimed at resolving these problems by translating problematic terms between world views and providing necessary explanations). These activities are supported by a modular ontology incorporating available quality-related knowledge; particular configuration of the ontology modules describes the quality view of the involved party. The proposed solution is expected to reduce the time and effort for establishing a communication basis while discussing software quality, thus cutting costs and strengthening the mutual trust of the parties.