Anja Hentschel

The EMISQ Method - Expert Based Evaluation of Internal Software Quality

Internal software quality, e.g. the quality of code, has great impact on the overall quality of software. Besides well known manual inspection and review techniques more recent approaches utilize tool-based static code for the evaluation of internal software quality. Despite the high potential of static code analyzers the application of tools alone cannot replace well founded expert opinion. Knowledge, experience and fair judgement is indispensable for a valid, reliable quality assessment, which is accepted by software developers and managers. The EMISQ method (evaluation method for internal software quality), guides the assessment process for all stakeholders of an evaluation project. The method is supported by a tool that assists evaluators with their analysis and rating tasks and provides support for generating a code quality report. The application of the method in a pilot project has shown its applicability.

The EMISQ method and its tool support-expert-based evaluation of internal software quality

There is empirical evidence that internal software quality, e.g., the quality of source code, has great impact on the overall quality of software. Besides well-known manual inspection and review techniques for source code, more recent approaches utilize tool-based static code analysis for the evaluation of internal software quality. Despite the high potential of code analyzers the application of tools alone cannot replace well-founded expert opinion. Knowledge, experience and fair judgment are indispensable for a valid, reliable quality assessment, which is accepted by software developers and managers. The EMISQ method (Evaluation Method for Internal Software Quality), guides the assessment process for all stakeholders of an evaluation project. The method is supported by the Software Product Quality Reporter (SPQR), a tool which assists evaluators with their analysis and rating tasks and provides support for generating code quality reports. The application of SPQR has already proved its usefulness in various code assessment projects around the world. This paper introduces the EMISQ method and describes the tool support needed for an efficient and effective evaluation of internal software quality.

On the Relation between External Software Quality and Static Code Analysis

Only a few studies exist that try to investigate whether there is a significant correlation between external software quality and the data provided by static code analysis tools. A clarification on this issue could pave the way for more precise prediction models on the probability of defects based on the violation of programming rules. We therefore initiated a study where the defect data of selected versions of the open source development environment ldquoEclipse SDKrdquo is correlated with the data provided by the static code analysis tools PMD and FindBugs applied the source code of Eclipse. The results from this study are promising as especially some PMD rulesets show a good correlation with the defect data and could therefore serve as basis for measurement, control and prediction of software quality.