Communicability - A Software Quality Attribute Proposal

This paper builds on the known fact that there are artifacts and constructs within the software product and process that enable or inhibit communication between developer stakeholders that is critical to software quality and success. Processes such as refactoring, version control and integration (which are critical to software quality), become difficult and costly when these artifacts such as commit messages, code comments, design documents and interface descriptions are not recognised and treated as legitimate communication structures which can in fact make or break the success of the software product. The paper, therefore, proposes the software quality attribute of communicability. A group of developers were surveyed to understand the experience of developers in relation to identified communication constructs and artifacts in software development. After this, the authors collaborated on the development of realistic communicability scenarios. A general scenario for communicability is created based on the concrete scenarios that were written. Furthermore, using the input of the developers a collection of communicability tactics were documented. The findings presented in this paper will be beneficial to requirements engineers and also software architects as they document quality attribute requirements for software with special requirements for clear communication between stakeholders.