Towards the development of a sustainable architecture for software process quality assessment and certification.

The quality of software can be determined through software process quality assessment and certification. It involves with numerous evaluation criteria and software development practices. More importantly, these evaluation criteria and practices are not fixed and needs further improvement from time to time due to the shifts in the environment, business needs and current trends. As a result, there is a need for a mechanism that can systematically organise those evaluation criteria and practices to ensure the sustainability of the assessment and certification process. Furthermore, based on the literature, currently there is a lack in the quality of test cases for Agile software development process. The testing process is critical for demonstrating the quality of a software product, however it is only partially addressed in the existing software process quality assessment and certification models. The Agile testing practices need to be improved in the existing software process quality assessment and certification reference standard so that it can tolerate with changes. Majority of the existing software process quality assessment and certification models have not addressed sustainable software architecture. Consequently, this research is working towards developing a sustainable software architecture for the software process quality assessment and certification. As a beginning, this paper illustrates the conceptual model which will be used as base to develop a sustainable architecture for software process quality assessment and certification. The contributions of this study straddle research perspectives of Software Process Assessment and Certification with the existence of the sustainable software architecture. From a practical perspective, this study will provide software practitioners with a more systematic and effective approach for assessment and certification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]