Software Quality

Chapter 16Software Product Quality Metrics

“You can't control what you can't measure.”

Tom De Marco (1962)

This quote from Tom De Marco has become the motto for software quality experts trying to develop and apply quality metrics in the software industry.

16.1 What are Software Quality Metrics? – an Introduction

Software quality and other software engineers have formulated the main objectives for software quality metrics, presented in Frame 16.1:

Frame 16.1: Objectives of Software Quality Metrics

Source: After ISO/IEC Std. 90003-2014 Sec. 8 (ISO/IEC ).

Objectives of software quality metrics:

• To assist management to monitor and control development and maintenance of software systems and their process improvements by:
• Observing the conformance of software product to functionality and other requirements, regulations, and conventions.
• Serving as a data source for process improvement by:
  • - Identifying cases of low performance requiring improvement.
  • - Demonstrating the achievements of process improvement proposals (corrective actions)

The metrics are used for comparison of performance data with indicators that are quantitative values, such as:

• Defined software quality standards
• Quality targets set for organizations or individuals
• Previous year's quality achievements
• Previous project's quality achievements
• Average quality levels achieved by other teams applying the same development tools in similar development environments
• Average quality achievements of the organization ...