QM: A tool for building software quality models

This paper presents QM, a tool for supporting the construction of quality models for software systems. The quality framework assumed for QM is defined by means of a conceptual model. The goals of QM are enumerated and its functionalities described. Among other, QM provides functionalities to define software quality factors, to reuse these quality factors among different quality models, to state relationships among them and to assign metrics for their future evaluation. The construction of quality models can be guided following any method and new methods can be defined using the tool itself. QM has been designed to be integrated with other tools to support processes in the different contexts where quality models can be used (software development, component selection, etc). As an example, the architecture of a whole system for supporting component selection processes is finally included.