Methods for supporting management of interactions between quality characteristics

Improving a particular quality characteristic in a software product may have a negative impact on the others. The literature shows that few organizations handle interactions between quality characteristics; this neglect may be a causal factor in failed projects. That led us to propose a process framework to support organizations that want to manage the interactions between quality characteristics. In this paper, we present the methods that may be used when the process framework is deployed. The methods were extracted from a published mapping study on software quality trade-offs. They were classified with regard to the particular context facet addressed and the specific decision-making approach used. Our contribution is a set of methods to manage interaction between quality characteristics, organized into a software process framework.