PIA02: ISO/IEC 25000 Criteria in Assessing Cloud Native Application Quality

Abstract

Technological updates, upgrades and trends on how software is developed have led to the introduction of a number of diverse architectural patterns, practices, and technologies, as well as to the obsolescence of standards, technology, patterns, and ways of creating software applications. Microservices archi- tecture, DevOps, containerization, cloud computing, and many other new technologies have led to the introduction of Cloud Native Applications. Nonetheless, one crucial aspect that has been present regardless of technologies such as programming languages, or types of software applications, has been software product quality. This paved the way to the creation of ISO/IEC 9126 Software Product Quality, in 1991, and its successor, ISO/IEC 25000 System and Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) series in 2005. Our research assesses and analyzes this latter series of standards, aimed at creating an enriched version that comprises quality attributes concerning cloud native applications. After reviewing current literature on the subject, five different quality attributes were found that could be adopted into a Cloud Native Application focused ISO/IEC 25000 Standard Series: elasticity, loose coupling, observability, resiliency and scalability, along with one or more associated quality measures. The new measures, along with those that were considered applicable and relevant to the investigation, were applied to a case study to assess cloud native application quality with an extended ISO/IEC 25000.