Improving unified process methodology by implementing new quality management discipline

Abstract

Unified process, a leading software development methodology, allows project teams to incrementally build their software and structurally defines project roles, phases, iterations and disciplines. One of the issues that arise when applying unified process is absence of discipline for quality assurance and control. This research aims to define new discipline entitled “quality management of software development” and its processes, in order to produce modified version of unified process, suitable for continually controlling quality in software development projects. This discipline will integrate ISO 9126 “Software engineering – product quality”, which is an international standard for addressing software quality and quality control tools, as proposed by Project Management Book of Knowledge 2010. Main hypothesis of this research is that, by defining and integrating new discipline of quality management, project teams that employ this new, modified version of unified process, will be able to produce software of higher quality level. Experimental research is conducted on four software development projects, ranging from 2009 to 2010, two of which use standard, and two of which use modified unified process model. Research results show higher software quality levels in two projects that use modified unified process methodology.