Integrating TQM and SEI Process Assessment

This paper describes a methodology for assessing the software process (both development and maintenance) used by an organization. The assessment methodology integrates the principles of Total Quality Management and the work of the Software Engineering Institute. Assessment results in a well-understood, well-documented, quantitatively evaluated software process. The methodology utilizes four steps: investigation, modeling, data collection, and analysis of both process content and process output. Process improvements are determined by analysis results

A Lifecycle Which Incorporates Software Metrics

The traditional waterfall life cycle model of software development provides a systematic method to separate the development process into different stages with explicit communication boundaries between each subsequent stage. But the waterfall model does not provide quantitative measurements for the products of each phase in the software life cycle. The model provides a base to develop methodologies which emphasize the completeness of the documents, the use of certain disciplines, and the consistency among documents. On the other hand, it is very hard to use the model to develop methodologies which provide 1) the quantitative evaluation of the quality of the documents (products) from each phase, 2) feedback information to help the manager make management decisions, and 3) criteria for redesigning or recoding a system. To ensure the quality of software products, a common basis for more meaningful evaluation leading to better understanding of software quality must be provided

A Controlled Experiment to Evaluate Maintainability of Object-Oriented Software

New software tools and methodologies make claims that managers often believe intuitively without evidence. Many unsupported claims have been made about object-oriented programming. However, without scientific evidence, it is impossible to accept these claims as valid. Although experimentation has been done in the past, most of the research is very recent and the most relevant research has serious drawbacks. This paper describes an experiment which compares the maintainability of two functionally equivalent systems, in order to explore the claim that systems developed with object-oriented languages are more easily maintained than those programmed with procedural languages. We found supporting evidence that programmers produce more maintainable code with an object-oriented language than with a standard procedural language

Static and Dynamic Software Quality Metric Tools

The ability to detect and predict poor software quality is of major importance to software engineers, managers, and quality assurance organizations. Poor software quality leads to increased development costs and expensive maintenance. With so much attention on exacerbated budgetary constraints, a viable alternative is necessary. Software quality metrics are designed for this purpose. Metrics measure aspects of code or PDL representations, and can be collected and used throughout the life cycle [RAMC85]

Measurement of Ada Throughout the Software Development Life Cycle

Quality enhancement has now become a major factor in software production. Software metrics have demonstrated their ability to predict source code complexity at design time and to predict maintainability of a software system from source code. Obviously metrics can assist software developers in the enhancement of quality. Tools which automatically generate metrics for Ada are increasing in popularity. This paper describes an existing tool which produces software metrics for Ada that may be used throughout the software development life cycle. This tool, while calculating established metrics, also calculates a new structure metric that is designed to capture communication interface complexity. Measuring designs written using Ada as a PDL allows designers early feedback on possible problem areas in addition to giving direction on testing strategies

Software Metrics and the Object-Oriented Paradigm

Software metrics are in use to guide current software development practices. As commercial organizations make use of the benefits of the object-oriented paradigm, the desire to apply metrics to that paradigm has logically followed. However, standard procedural metrics are limited in their ability to describe true object-oriented designs and code, and in some aspects fail outright. This paper describes the difficulties in applying standard metrics to object-oriented code and defines a set of metrics which are specifically geared toward the features which make the object-oriented approach unique

Object-Oriented Metrics Which Predict Maintainability

Software metrics have been studied in the procedural paradigm as a quantitative means of assessing the software development process as well as the quality of software products. Several studies have validated that various metrics are useful indicators of maintenance effort in the procedural paradigm. However, software metrics have rarely been studied in the object oriented paradigm. Very few metrics have been proposed to measure object oriented systems, and the proposed ones have not been validated. This research concentrates on several object oriented software metrics and the validation of these metrics with maintenance effort in two commercial systems. Statistical analyses of a prediction model incorporating ten metrics are performed. In addition, a more compact model with fewer metrics was sought, analyses performed, and also presented

Complexity Measurement of a Graphical Programming Language

For many years the software engineering community has been attacking the software reliability problem on two fronts: First via design methodologies, languages and tools as a precheck on quality and second by measuring the quality of produced software as a postcheck. This research attempts to unify the approach to creating reliable software by providing the ability to measure the quality of a design prior to its design implementation. Using a graphical design language in an effort to support cognitive science research, we have successfully defined and applied Software Quality Metrics to graphical designs in an effort to predict software quality early in the software lifecycle. Metrics values from the Graphical Design are input to predictor equations, provided in this paper, to give metric values for the resultant source code

An Empirical Study of Maintenance Activities in Two Object Oriented Systems

Decades of research on maintenance activities in the procedural paradigm has produced several conclusions. Among these conclusions are recommendations that a reduction in maintenance cost could be achieved by a more controlled design process, by more rigorous testing of potential problem areas earlier in the life cycle. With the increasing emphasis on the object oriented paradigm, the authors performed an empirical study of the maintenance patterns in two commercial object oriented systems. Although this is a preliminary study, intuition is presented as insight into the object oriented maintenance activities

A Design Tool Used to Quantitatively Evaluate Student Projects

In the last decade, the field of Computer Science has undergone a revolution. It has started the move from a mysterious art form to a detailed science. The vehicle for this progress has been the rising popularity of the field of Software Engineering. This innovative area of computer science has brought about a number of changes in the way we think of, and work with, the development of software. Due to this renovation, a field that started with little or no design techniques and unstructured, unreliable software has progressed to a point where a plethora of techniques exist to improve the quality of a program design as well as that of the resultant software. The popularity of structured design and coding techniques prove that there is widespread belief that the overall product produced using these ideas is somehow better, and statistics seem to indicate that this belief is true. Until recently, however, there existed no technique for quantitatively showing one program better than its functional equivalent. In the past few years, the use of software quality metrics seems to indicate that such a comparison is not only possible, but is also valid. The advent of Software Engineering has demanded that most universities offer a Software Engineering course which entails a "Real-World" group project. Students participating in the class design a system using a program design language (PDL). Other students then write code from the design and finally the design team integrates the modules into a working system. For a complete description of the class see [HENS83] and [TOMJ87]