SE-EQUAM - An Evolvable Quality Metamodel

Quality has become a key assessment factor for organizations to determine if their software ecosystems are capable to meet constantly changing environmental factors and requirements. Many quality models exist to assess the evolvability or maintainability of software systems. Common to these models is that they, contrary to the software ecosystems they are assessing, are not evolvable or reusable. In this research, we introduce SE-EQUAM a novel ontology-based quality assessment metamodel that was designed from ground up to support model reuse and evolvability. SE-EQUAM takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies such as support for the open world assumption, incremental knowledge population, and knowledge inference. We present a case study that illustrates the reusability and evolvability of our SE-EQUAM approach.