Defining Metrics for Evaluating Transparency in Software Engineering Process

Abstract

Transparency has become an important non-functional quality requirement of software products and processes. In software engineering, stakeholders, especially software developers and requirements engineers, do not fully know how to benefit from transparency because of the lack of suitable measures and metrics that can be utilised in transparency evaluation and its improvement. Few existing metrics are also poorly defined and, therefore, poorly understood. This paper proposes measures and metrics for evaluating and improving transparency. By integrating the "define-your-own-model," the Goal Question Metric and the model-driven engineering paradigms, we provide a comprehensive set of transparency quality measures and metrics that can be used in a transparency improvement programme.