Technical support for adapting software quality models

Nowadays software influences the outcome of almost every economic sector and the quality of software as shown to be a key success factor. Therefore, organizations are well advised to focus on improving the quality of software to survive in a global competition. Quality models have shown to be a suitable instrument to objectively characterizing and managing software quality, but unlike other branches, for several reasons existing standards to define software quality are generally too abstract for practical application or limited to a specific context. A possible solution for this situation seems to be provid-ing a well detailed and to a large extent standardized "base" quality model together with a well-defined adaptation approach to cope with the huge diversity in software systems and quality needs. In order to be applicable in practices, such an adaptation approach needs a technical implementation following an appropriate usability concept that supports the users in the efficient, syntactical correct and goal-oriented adaptation of quality models. Based on a given quality model structure (meta model) and a defined adaptation process, this thesis analysis existing implantations of adaptation mechanisms in related areas to derive a usability concept for a technical solution for quality model adaptation. Further, this thesis covers the implementation of a tool support (Adaptation Assistant) based on the derived usability concept and its evaluation in an empirical study. The study results indicate that the developed assistant improves the correctness of the adapted quality model according to the meta model and its completeness according to the adaptation goals as well as the efficiency of the adaptation. Moreover, the study participants perceive a quality model editor extended with the assistant as easier to use and more useful for adapting quality models