A Method for the Definition and Treatment of Conceptual Schema Quality Issues

In the literature, there are many proposals of quality properties of conceptual schemas, but only a few of them (mainly those related to syntax) have been integrated into the development environments used by professionals and students. A possible explanation of this unfortunate fact may be that the proposals have been defined in disparate ways, which makes it difficult to integrate them into those environments. In this paper we define quality properties in terms of quality issues, which essentially are conditions that should not happen, and we propose a unified method for their definition and treatment. We show that our method is able to define most of the existing quality properties in a uniform way and makes it possible to integrate quality issues into development environments. The method can be adapted to several languages. We present a prototype implementation of our method as an Eclipse plugin. We have evaluated the potential usefulness of our method by analyzing the presence of a set of quality issues in a set of conceptual schemas developed by students as part of their projects.