Software Product Quality Models

Summary

Both for software developers and managers it is crucial to have information about different aspects of the quality of their systems. This chapter gives a brief overview about the history of software product quality measurement, focusing on software maintainability, and the existing approaches and high-level models for characterizing software product quality. The most widely accepted and used practical maintainability models and the state-of-the-art works in the subject are introduced. These models play a very important role in software evolution by allowing to estimate future development costs, assess risks, or support management decisions. Based on objective aspects, the implementations of the most popular software maintainability models are compared and evaluated. The evaluation includes the Quality Index, SQALE, SQUALE, SIG, QUAMOCO, and Columbus Quality Model. The chapter presents the result of comparing the features and stability of the tools and the different models on a large number of open-source Java projects.