A Framework for the Empirical Forecasting of the Software Quality

Before the beginning of the software development project that is based on contract between software user and developer company, the user company provides the RFP including project domain current situations and constraints, and all conditions such as desired initial system requirements specification as well as requesting documents of developer companies capabilities to ask the developer companies for their proposals to fulfill the requirements and competition with each other. This paper renders an evaluation model of proposals including non-functional requirements (NFRs). It is very important, mainly focusing on the NFRs since the system architecture and quality greatly depend on the NFRs. Within this framework, the NFRs existed in the RFP are weighed and are traced in the proposals cause evaluating respected quality attributes coverage and satisfaction level. The model helps the user company and its consultants compare the proposals and choose qualitative desired proposal. As a case study, 6 telecommunication projects RFPs were evaluated by the proposed model. As a result, we have confirmed that the model can forecast the software quality in practical environments and indicate the effect of each quality attribute coverage and satisfaction level for agreement between software user and developer company to trading price and quality off