An automated software quality measurement tool

Abstract

Software quality remains a very subjective and at times vague, notion. However it is a fact that most serious developers and the majority of software users require some form of qualitative measure for the software systems they are concerned with. Software quality assurance can be carried out at various stages of the software development process but this project deals with the measurement of the quality of object-oriented designs. The implemented system will allow the user to design any system using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and then provide quality readings from different perspectives of the system. It is worth noting that it is virtually impossible to come up with a quality scale to gauge the quality of systems. i.e. The project will not produce a result such as "The system is considered to be 85% good quality." This is mainly due to the fact that when asking for a quality system, conflicts and contradictions tend to occur (e.g. trying to develop a highly reusable system that is very efficient). In the light of this fact, the system will not gauge the quality of the system on a predefined scale but rather provide the user metric readings that provide different views of the quality characteristics of the system in question. The user will use the tool to identify potential problem areas and fix them before the project goes into implementation stage.