Software aging assessment through a specialization of the SQuaRE quality model

In the last years the software application portfolio has become a key asset for almost all companies. During their lives, applications undergo lots of changes to add new functionalities or to refactor older ones; these changes tend to reduce the quality of the applications themselves, causing the phenomenon known as software aging. Monitoring of software aging is very important for companies, but up to now there are no standard approaches to perform this task. In addition many of the suggested models assess software aging basing on few software features, whereas this phenomenon affects all of the software aspects. In 2005ISO/IEC released the SQuaRE quality model which covers several elements of software quality assessment, but some issues make SQuaRE usage quite difficult. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach to software aging monitoring that considers the software product in its wholeness and to provide a specialization of the SQuaRE quality model which allows to perform this task.