Architecture-Driven Development of an Electronic Health Record Considering the SOAQM Quality Model

Abstract

Service computing has been considered for many years a suitable solution to develop and integrate legacy systems. Considering the important role of services for integrating legacy systems in organizations, quality should be treated as a key issue. By observing previous works published in the literature, it is clear that there is a need for the development of a specific quality model for Service-Oriented Architecture based on the latest ISO/IEC 25010 standard. This article presents a SOA quality model, named SOAQM, multiple architecture views and design decisions for developing an electronic health record (EHR). Most often, quality aspects, architectural views and decisions are neglected during the EHR development, which leads to difficulties for future software maintenance. Even those studies which present the software architecture only describe one or two views, or even a multiple number of views in only one box diagram, which may be confusing for most stakeholders. The process proposed in this article to develop the EHR system includes definition of software architecture through architectural decisions, multiple views and UML and SoaML models. The set of architectural decisions defined to develop the EHR was guided by SOAQM. A technical evaluation was performed by a group of eight software specialists that analyzed the EHR process development through a technical report and then provided their opinions through questionnaires and interviews. As a result of this evaluation, the EHR development process guided by the SOAQM quality model is considered important as it regards quality attributes in software development since early stages.