Secure Model for Software Quality Assurance

Abstract

The increasing usage of software in all fields of life, including safety-critical departments of organisations has necessitated the need for the development of quality software. Although software quality is of paramount concern to software development, it may be a challenging task to software developers as it depends on ensuring that developed software meet the standards of software quality design. Different quality models have been proposed by researchers to serve as a benchmark for software quality design but most of these models are tailored towards specific projects’ needs, hence, the need for the generic quality model suitable for evaluation of all software projects. In this research, eleven (11) main software quality attributes and thirteen (13) sub-attributes were identified and used for the quality assurance model. These were attained from ten well-known standard software quality models to rank the quality attributes. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to rank the software quality attributes and maintainability was observed to have the highest score while cost had the lowest score. Mathematical models of the quality attributes were used to evaluate software and the scores attained by each attribute was modeled with a voting model and multiplied with the criteria weight from the AHP to get the overall quality score for each evaluated software. Access to the quality assurance model was restricted by the development of an access control model with the use of the Bell-LaPadula and Biba model to regulate the people who use the model. To perform software evaluation, the application must be hosted online, hence, must have a domain name. As a result, twenty eight web-based applications, grouped under six (6) categories, namely, Educational, E commerce, Company, Document Creation Software, Video editing, and Form creation web applications were evaluated. Results from the evaluation showed that Document Creation Software had the highest average quality score of 96.21% while Educational web applications had the lowest average score of 84.16%. To evaluate the performance of the software quality assurance model, recent works were used. The performance evaluation showed that our model outperformed their models when evaluated against the attributes they used and when extended to the use of eleven (11) quality attributes. The access control model was also evaluated for accuracy, precision, and recall and was seen to have values of 0.93, 0.96, and 0.91, respectively. The study has established a model for assessing the quality of software factoring in the major attributes of software quality assurance.