Quality quantification in Systems Engineering from the Qualimetry Eye

TL;DR

This paper explores how qualimetry can improve quality quantification in systems engineering by addressing current limitations and introducing a new framework and process for designing adaptable quality models.

Contribution

The authors introduce the 'House of Qualimetry' framework, a set of attributes for quality models, and a new process for designing and adapting quality models in systems engineering.

Findings

Identified limitations of current quality quantification approaches.

Proposed the 'House of Qualimetry' framework and six pillars.

Introduced a new process for designing and adapting quality models.

Abstract

Nowadays, quality definition, assessment, control and prediction cannot easily be missed in systems engineering. One common factor among these activities is quality quantification. Therefore, throughout this paper, the authors focus on the problems relating to quality quantification in systems engineering. They first identify the main drawbacks of the current approaches adopted in this domain. They demonstrate how current solutions are not easily repeatable and adaptable across systems and how in most cases, the related standards such as ISO/IEC 25010 or Automotive-SPICE to cite just a few, are not used as they are within companies today. Fortunately, qualimetry, a young science with the purpose of quality quantification, provides the tools to resolve these gaps. To be able to use these tools, the authors propose a synthetic representation of qualimetry and its six pillars, named the ''House of Qualimetry'' and explain the fundamendal aspects of qualimetry. They identify a set of 8 attributes to characterize the design quality model and based on these attributes, propose a new process to design or adapt the quality model. Among these attributes, a new one is introduced to capture and measure the quality model evolution and adaptation aspect: the polymorphism and the polymorphism degree. Finally, the authors consolidate the measurement part thanks to a new measurement process before returning to the benefits of these contributions to systems engineering.