Abstraction Sheets for Improving Comprehensibility of Quality Models

The need for systematic evaluation of process quality and of the resulting products has always been an issue of primary importance within the software engineering community. To this end, for assessing desired quality, use of goal oriented measurement plans is adopted. Nevertheless, many software organizations still strive to define and adopt measurement plans successfully. Causes are most likely attributable to aspects such as dimensions, complexity, dependencies among goals. Such issues inevitably influence comprehensibility of the quality model and make both measurement and interpretation procedures quite onerous. In this scenario, we reconsider and reinterpret the concept of abstraction sheets. Our conjecture is that abstraction sheets are a means for improving comprehensibility of a quality model validation has been assessed out through a case study carried out on quality models developed by students in two different academic years within a software engineering course.