Quality-driven validation: a link between four research traditions

Quality-driven validation is presented as a design rationale extension of software construction and can be defined in terms of three activities: specifying the relevant quality characteristics, justifying the choices made between alternative descriptions by reference to quality characteristics (design rationales), and recording the design rationale in connection with design descriptions. This paper discusses the theoretical aspects of quality-driven validation from information systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence and quality assurance viewpoints, and describes experiments with CASE tools