Overview

A large body of literature has appeared over the past three or four decades on how developers can measure various aspects of software development and use, from the productivity of the programmers coding it to the satisfaction of the ultimate end users applying it to their business problems. Some metrics are broader than others. In any scientific measurement effort, you must balance the sensitivity and the selectivity of the measures employed. Here we are primarily concerned with the quality of the software end product as seen from the end user's point of view. Although much of the software metrics technology used in the past was applied downstream, the overall trend in the field is to push measurement methods and models back upstream to the design phase and even to measurement of the architecture itself. The issue in measuring software performance and quality is clearly its complexity as compared even to the computer hardware on which it runs. Managing complexity and finding significant surrogate indicators of program complexity must go beyond merely estimating the number of lines of code the program is expected to require.

Chapter Outline

• Measuring Software Quality

• Classic Software Quality Metrics

• Total Quality Management

• Generic Software Quality Measures

• Current Metrics and Models Technology

• New Metrics for Architectural Design and Assessment

• Common Architectural Design Problems

• Pattern Metrics in OOAD

• Key Points

• Additional Resources

• Internet Exercises

• Review Questions

• Discussion Questions and Projects

• Endnotes