Towards modeling guidelines for capturing the cost of improving software product quality in release planning

Quality requirements complement functional requirements with information on the target quality levels of software functions or emergent system quality aspects. In release planning the allocation of development effort in further investments into product enhancements, new or enhanced functions are competing with quality improvements for limited resources. When setting balanced quality targets for development of coming releases, the estimated costs of improved software quality is needed as a basis for decisions. In this paper, we present initial results from an industrial evaluation of modeling guidelines for the Cost View in the QUality PERformance (QUPER) model. The initial results indicate the feasibility of the proposed modeling approach to cost estimation of quality requirements in QUPER, but further validation is needed.