An empirical study on software quality : developer perception of quality, metrics, and visualizations

Software tends to decline in quality over time, causing development and maintenance costs to rise. However, by measuring, tracking, and controlling quality during the lifetime of a software product, its technical debt can be held in check, reducing total cost of ownership. The measurement of quality faces challenges due to disagreement in the meaning of software quality, the inability to directly measure quality factors, and the lack of measurement practice in the software industry. This report addresses these challenges through both a literature survey, a metrics derivation process, and a survey of professional software developers. Definitions of software quality from the literature are presented and evaluated with responses from software professionals. A goal, question, metric process is used to derive quality-targeted metrics tracing back to a set of seven code-quality subgoals, while a survey to software professionals shows that despite agreement that metrics and metric visualizations would be useful for improving software quality, the techniques are underutilized in practice.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Engineering

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Wilson, Gary Lynn

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kim, Miryung

• Software
• Quality
• Metrics
• Software quality
• Software metrics
• Software evolution
• Survey
• Empirical study

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/2152/22606

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/22606