An application of qualitative preference to software quality evaluation

For rational human value judgement and evaluation, provision of clear evaluation data, objective value judgement criteria, and properly generalized evaluation methods are required. For instance, this is true for software quality evaluation, and the measure of software quality and the weighting method of evaluation target directly affect final decisions. However, it is not easy to find a generalized method for the software quality evaluation or product selection, because of its complex characteristics. In this paper, we apply the qualitative preference method based on quantitative belief functions to find a general weighting method for the software quality evaluation. In particular, the qualitative preference method, in which the differentiated preference expression is possible, is conceptually expanded for general applications in future. For this purpose, we hierarchically differentiate the strong preference relation from the weak preference relation, and show an example of quantification of software quality evaluation on different applications, by comparing the qualitative preference method with analytic hierarchy process. We believe that the application domain of this method is not limited to the software quality evaluation and it is very useful to apply this result to other software evaluation areas, e.g. metric selection with different views and priority determination of practices to be assessed in the SPICE.