5.6. Actions

MQC helps the user to identify the next steps to resolve quality deficits by recommending actions, where an action is a specific task which can improve one or more quality properties for a specific artifact.

Each action gets a priority according to the corresponding quality property measure value (see section Priority Groups). These priorities are used to create a sorted list of actions per revision.

5.6.1. Definition of Actions

Actions to improve the quality properties may be defined in the quality model (see Quality Model). Here, actions by default have a linear relationship to the related quality properties. For example, if a quality property has 80% quality then the respective action is assigned a priority of 20% and further assigned a priority group.

Besides the possibility to define a one-to-one relation between actions and quality properties, which means, one action directly improves a specific quality property, the following is possible, too:

  • one action assigned to multiple quality properties

    For example, an action “Derive further test sequences from uncovered requirements” may improve a quality property “Testable Requirements with Test Sequences” as well as the “Model Condition Coverage”.

  • multiple different actions assigned to single quality property

    For example, a quality property “Testable Requirements with Test Sequences” may be improved by deriving further test sequences from the requirements (see above), but also by linking already existing but not yet linked test sequences to requirements (action “Link test sequences to (covered) requirements”).

In case the quality model contains a quality property without any assigned action, MQC assigns a default action “Improve …” followed by the name of the quality property.

Additionally, if the quality property does not have a calculated measure value for a revision then the respective action is replaced by another default action, “Start evaluation …” followed by the name of a quality property. This means that, the data to calculate that quality property has not yet been loaded into MQC.

5.6.2. Priority Groups

To create a sorted list of actions for multiple artifacts, each action gets a priority based on the corresponding quality property measure value.

MQC uses the following categories:

  • Very High

  • High

  • Moderate

  • Low

  • Very Low

An action with a priority “Very High” has be to executed in any case, whereas the one with priority “Very Low” can be postponed until all other more urgent actions have been performed.

For example, if a quality property has a value of 5 % for a specific artifact, the quality must be improved, therefore the corresponding action gets a “Very High” priority. If the calculated quality property measure value is already 90 %, it still can be improved, but there may be other tasks (worse quality) to be executed before, and the corresponding action gets a priority “Very Low”.

These priorities can be influenced by defining specific artifact weights and quality property weights. By that, an action for a certain artifact will get a higher priority, if the artifact is more important than other artifacts.

Assigned priorities only define, if an action should be executed before another action based on the fact that one quality property has a relatively bad quality value than another.

A given priority does not say anything about the improvement impact of an action on the overall quality!