Requirements engineering and process modelling in software quality management: towards a generic process metamodel

This paper examines the concept of Quality in Software Engineering, its different contexts and its different meanings to various people. It begins with a commentary on quality issues for systems development and various stakeholders' involvement. It revisits aspects and concepts of systems development methods and highlights the relevance of quality issues to the choice of a process model. A summarised review of some families of methods is presented, where their application domain, lifecycle coverage, strengths and weaknesses are considered. Under the new development era the requirements of software development change; the role of methods and stakeholders change, too. The paper refers to the latest developments in the area of software engineering and emphasises the shift from traditional conceptual modelling to requirements engineering and process metamodelling principles. We provide support for an emerging discipline in the form of a software process metamodel to cover new issues for software quality and process improvement. The widening of the horizons of software engineering both as a ‘communication tool’ and as a ‘scientific discipline’ (and not as a ‘craft’) is needed in order to support both communicative and scientific quality systems properties. In general, we can consider such a discipline as a thinking tool for understanding the generic process and as the origin of combining intuition and quality engineering to transform requirements to adequate human-centred information systems. We conclude with a schematic representation of a Generic Process Metamodel (GPM) indicating facets contributed by Software Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, Linguistics, Sociology and Anthropology. Ongoing research and development issues have provided evidence for influence from even more diverse disciplines.