Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics

Computing devices and associated software govern everyday life, and form the backbone of safety critical systems in banking, healthcare, automotive and other fields. Increasing system complexity, quickly evolving technologies and paradigm shifts have kept software quality research at the forefront. Standards such as ISO's 25010 express it in terms of sub-characteristics such as maintainability, reliability and security. A significant body of literature attempts to link these subcharacteristics with software metric values, with the end goal of creating a metric-based model of software product quality. However, research also identifies the most important existing barriers. Among them we mention the diversity of software application types, development platforms and languages. Additionally, unified definitions to make software metrics truly language-agnostic do not exist, and would be difficult to implement given programming language levels of variety. This is compounded by the fact that many existing studies do not detail their methodology and tooling, which precludes researchers from creating surveys to enable data analysis on a larger scale. In our paper, we propose a comprehensive study of metric values in the context of three complex, open-source applications. We align our methodology and tooling with that of existing research, and present it in detail in order to facilitate comparative evaluation. We study metric values during the entire 18-year development history of our target applications, in order to capture the longitudinal view that we found lacking in existing literature. We identify metric dependencies and check their consistency across applications and their versions. At each step, we carry out comparative evaluation with existing research and present our results.Comment: Published in: Molnar AJ., Neam\c{t}u A., Motogna S. (2020) Evaluation of Software Product Quality Metrics. In: Damiani E., Spanoudakis G., Maciaszek L. (eds) Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. ENASE 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1172. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40223-5_

SYS/3 - a Software Development Tool

In this paper we summarize the current state of the development of SYS/3 (SYStematic SYStem Development SYStem), the main features of the system and further research. SYS/3 assists in developing software systems according to a pre-stated standard and assures proper quality of software during its entire life-cycle. A software is considered a set of system configuration items called documents. SYS/3 facilitates writing and checking appropriate documents. Special built-in and external functions generate test cases and Pascal source frames. The major parts of SYS/3 are generated with the SYSGEN system generator system. It makes SYS/3 fairly flexible and easily modifiable. The input specification yields a high level description of the system. 1 Introduction One of the crucial problems for software developers is the quality of software. There are two methods for providing high quality of a software product. The first is software validation. It means that one proves the correctness ..