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Developing a Quality Report for Software Maintainability Assessment: An Exploratory Survey

Authors:
Pascal Giessler
Manuel Gerster
Michael Gebhart
Roland Steinegger
Sebastian Abeck

Keywords: maintainability assessment; software quality; quality report; quality analysis; quality indicators

Abstract:
Maintainability can be a key factor concerning the success of a software product, since the majority of software life cycle costs is spent on maintenance. Therefore, there is a deep interest in analyzing and assessing the maintainability of a software product with the objective of identifying the need for action and subsequently minimizing maintenance expenses. Often software quality metrics are used to analyze the influencing factors of maintainability while an expert uses their results for the assessment. However, these metrics are distributed across several tools, dashboards, and literature. Moreover, there are further quality indicators for analyzing the maintainability that cannot be evaluated automatically by means of metrics. Hence, we aim to develop a quality report containing well-known quality metrics and further quality indicators that allows an expert to assess the system under review regarding its maintainability. For this reason, we conducted an exploratory survey in the area of research and industry to get the essential ingredients of such a quality report. In this paper, we present the survey and its outcomes. The survey shows potential ingredients of a quality report, i.e., metrics and quality indicators, which can be measured not only automatically but also manually.

Pages: 36 to 43

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: February 21, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8394

ISBN: 978-1-61208-458-9

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 21, 2016 to February 25, 2016