An Emerging Experience Factory to Support High-Quality Applications Based on Software Components and Services (Invited Paper)

Software components and services (SCS) are playing an increasingly important role in software engineering, particularly as building blocks of systems that demand high quality and dependability. A major impediment to advances in developing such systems is the difficulty of providing objective evaluations and conducting rigorous experiments to determine the efficacy of selected SCS and the resulting systems. This paper presents a framework that facilitates such experimentation to measure SCS quality in the target usage environment, to provide unbiased quality assessment, and to support effective usage of SCS in high quality applications. We are building a comprehensive collection of 1) usage scenarios in a set of target operational profiles and 2) a flexible defect classification and analysis framework and related quality analyses. Our work will form the first step of an operational experience factory for SCS. Resulting repositories and supporting facilities from applying our approach to web-based applications are included to demonstrate its viability.