Quality certification based on hierarchical classification of software packages

With the advance of software and computer technology, COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) software is radically diversified and its application areas are also being extended. Because software quality evaluation is dependent upon types of software and environments where software is operated, certification organizations need different certification programs that are foundations or basic frames for certifying software. Although we can certify new software products by making new certification programs or referring to previous ones, both of them are somewhat ineffective methods. Therefore, we need to systematically generate certification programs to assess new software, and consider types of software and software environments at the same time. In this paper, we propose a meta model in order to systematically derive certification programs from previous ones. With this model, we can construct certification programs incrementally based on hierarchical classification of software packages. Furthermore, by generating certification programs with quality data on some certified software products, we validate the meta model.