SQuAP-Ont: an Ontology of Software Quality Relational Factors from Financial Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology formalizing the interactions among quality, architecture, and process factors in banking software systems, enabling reasoning with Linked Data.

Contribution

It presents SQuAP-Ont, a novel ontology based on reusing design patterns to formalize and reason about software quality factors in financial systems.

Findings

SQuAP-Ont enables formal reasoning about software quality relations.

The ontology models 28 key factors affecting banking software quality.

It facilitates Linked Data integration for software engineering analysis.

Abstract

Quality, architecture, and process are considered the keystones of software engineering. ISO defines them in three separate standards. However, their interaction has been scarcely studied, so far. The SQuAP model (Software Quality, Architecture, Process) describes twenty-eight main factors that impact on software quality in banking systems, and each factor is described as a relation among some characteristics from the three ISO standards. Hence, SQuAP makes such relations emerge rigorously, although informally. In this paper, we present SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology designed by following a well-established methodology based on the re-use of Ontology Design Patterns (i.e. ODPs). SQuAP-Ont formalises the relations emerging from SQuAP to represent and reason via Linked Data about software engineering in a three-dimensional model consisting of quality, architecture, and process ISO characteristics.