Component-Based Development (CBD) approach now is widely accepted in software industry. This approach enables efficient application development through the integration of already developed software components. The success of these applications heavily depends upon the selection of appropriate components to fit customer requirements. Therefore it is very necessary to evaluate the quality of components before using them in the final system. Quality models proposed so far can not be fully implemented as-it-is on components and component-based systems (CBS) due to architectural differences in the development approach. Present paper surveys a number of quality models for traditional and component-based systems and proposes a new model for CBS by proposing some new characteristics, which may be very relevant in the context of components. All the quality characteristics may not be of prime importance for an application to be developed for a specific domain. Therefore, it is necessary to identify only those characteristics/sub-characteristics, which may have higher priorities over the others. The present work uses Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assign the weight values to the characteristics for the proposed model. These weight values are then used to evaluate the quality contribution of sub-characteristics, characteristics and then finally the overall quality of the component by using the appropriate metrics. This approach can be used to identify and select better quality component among several others which can be used in the final system.

Estimation of quality for software components: an empirical approach

Actually, software products are increasing in a fast way and are used in almost all activities of human life. Consequently measuring and evaluating the quality of a software product has become a critical task for many companies. Several models have been proposed to help diverse types of users with quality issues. The development of techniques for building software has influenced the creation of models to assess the quality. Since 2000 the construction of software started to depend on generated or manufactured components and gave rise to new challenges for assessing quality. These components introduce new concepts such as configurability, reusability, availability, better quality and lower cost. Consequently the models are classified in basic models which were developed until 2000, and those based on components called tailored quality models. The purpose of this article is to describe the main models with their strengths and point out some deficiencies. In this work, we conclude that in the present age, aspects of communications play an important factor in the quality of software.

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A Review of Software Quality Models for the Evaluation of Software Products

Software development team flexibility antecedents

In last decade, researchers have often tried to improve the usability, portability, integrity and other aspects of software in order for it to be more users friendly and gain user trust. Several approaches and techniques have been proposed to reduce the negative effects of software size and complexity. Moreover, several software quality models were proposed to evaluate general and specific type of software products. These models were proposed to evaluate general or specific scopes of software products. The proposed models were developed based on comparisons between the well-known models, in order to customize the closed model to the intended scope. These comparisons are leak of criteria that is conducted based on different perspectives and understanding. Therefore, a formal method of comparison between software quality models is proposed. The proposed method is applied on a comprehensive comparison between well-known software quality models. The result of the proposed method shows the strength and weaknesses of those models.

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Software Quality Models: A Comparative Study

Software measurement is a key factor in managing, controlling, and improving the software development processes. Software quality is one of the most important factors for assessing the global competitive position of any software company. Thus the quantification of quality parameters and integrating them into quality models is very essential. Software quality criteria are not very easily measured and quantified. Many attempts have been made to exactly quantify the software quality parameters using various models such as ISO/IEC 9126 Quality Model, Boehm's Model, McCall's model, etc. In this paper an attempt has been made to provide a tool for precisely quantifying software quality factors with the help of quality factors stated in ISO/IEC 9126 model. Due to the unpredictable nature of the software quality attributes, the fuzzy multi criteria approach has been used to evolve the quality of the software.

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Integrated Software Quality Evaluation: A Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Approach

Studies show that COTS-based (Commercial off the shelf) systems that are being built recently are exceeding 40% of the total developed software systems. Therefore, a model that ensures quality characteristics of such systems becomes a necessity. Among the most critical processes in COTS-based systems are the evaluation and selection of the COTS components. There are several existing quality models used to evaluate software systems in general; however, none of them is dedicated to COTS-based systems. In this contribution, an analysis study has been carried out on several existing software quality models, namely: McCall's, Boehm, ISO 9126, FURPS, Dromey, ISO/IEC TR 15504-2 1998(E), Triangle and Quality Cube, for the purpose of evaluating them and defining a ground to build a new model specializing in evaluating and selecting COTS components. The study also outlines limitations found in the existing models, such as the tendency to ignore a certain quality feature like Functionality or the failure to describe how the quality measurement in these models has been carried out. As a result of this analysis, a new model has been built that supports a standard set of quality characteristics suitable for evaluating COTS components, along with newly defined sets of sub-characteristics associated with them. The new model avoids some of the limitations found in the existing models. The new model ignores quality characteristics that are not applicable to COTS components and is empowered with new ones that are. In addition, it matches the appropriate type of stakeholders with corresponding quality characteristics; such a feature is missing in all existing models. The objective of the new model is to guide organizations that are in the process of building COTS-based systems to evaluate and choose the appropriate products, and that is essential to the success of the entire system.

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A New Software Quality Model for Evaluating COTS Components

Cloud computing is currently a major focal point for researchers owing to its widespread application and benefits. Cloud computing's complete reliance on the internet for service provision and its distributed nature pose challenges to security, the most serious being insider Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) which causes a total deactivation of service. Traditional defence mechanisms, such as firewalls, are unable to detect insider attacks. This work proposes an anomaly intrusion detection approach in the hypervisor layer to discourage DDoS activities between virtual machines. The proposed approach is implemented by the evolutionary neural network which integrates the particle swarm optimisation with neural network for detection and classification of the traffic that is exchanged between virtual machines. The performance analysis and results of our proposed approach detect and classify the DDoS attacks in the cloud environment with minimum false alarms and high detection accuracy.

An anomaly-based approach for DDoS attack detection in cloud environment

In both approximate and exact string searching algorithms, the shift distance at the skipping
step plays a major role in the performance of string matching algorithms. A new algorithm called the
Modified Character-Weight Algorithm (MWA) has been developed to test the effect of the shift
distance on the performance of approximate string matching. An experiment was performed
comparing the performance of the MWA with that of Mhashi’s Character-Weight Algorithm (WA) using English text of size 1,005,077 characters. Using the average number of comparisons and the clock time as evaluation criteria, the MWA algorithm used only about 4% to 15% as many comparisons as the WA algorithm and about 10% to 35% of the clock time.

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A Fast Approximate String Searching Algorithm

Reusing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in large system development provides several benefits, including accelerated development, increased dependability, and reduced process risk. However, choosing the right component among multiple alternatives is considered a hard process and may involve risk. Throughout the development life cycle, many stakeholders contribute from their own perspectives, and interests. End users desire ease of use, which is a user-focused quality attribute. Under such circumstances, there should be a mechanism that helps stakeholders to make decisions accordingly. Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) or multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), a sub-discipline of operations research, explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision-making. This research work introduces a decision-making methodology application that employs two well-known MCDM techniques, namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). Combining AHP and VIKOR enables the new model to effectively select the best alternative from among a range of COTS components.

Adnan Rawashdeh

Papers

A New Software Quality Model for Evaluating COTS Components

An anomaly-based approach for DDoS attack detection in cloud environment

A Fast Approximate String Searching Algorithm

A hybrid AHP-VIKOR methodology to evaluate for adoption COTS database components based on usability