Tibor Bakota

A cost model based on software maintainability

In this paper we present a maintainability based model for estimating the costs of developing source code in its evolution phase. Our model adopts the concept of entropy in thermodynamics, which is used to measure the disorder of a system. In our model, we use maintainability for measuring disorder (i.e. entropy) of the source code of a software system. We evaluated our model on three proprietary and two open source real world software systems implemented in Java, and found that the maintainability of these evolving software is decreasing over time. Furthermore, maintainability and development costs are in exponential relationship with each other. We also found that our model is able to predict future development costs with high accuracy in these systems.

Qualitygate SourceAudit: A tool for assessing the technical quality of software

Software systems are evolving continuously in order to fulfill the ever-changing business needs. This endless modification, however, decreases the internal quality of the system over time. This phenomena is called software erosion, which results in higher development, testing, and operational costs. The SourceAudit tool presented in this paper helps managing the technical risks of software deterioration by allowing imme-diate, automatic, and objective assessment of software quality. By monitoring the high-level technical quality of systems it is possible to immediately perform the necessary steps needed to reduce the effects of software erosion, thus reaching higher maintainability and lower costs in the mid and long-term. The tool measures source code maintainability according to the ISO/IEC 25010 based probabilistic software maintainability model called ColumbusQM. It gives a holistic view on software quality and warns on source code maintainability decline.

Continuous software quality supervision using SourceInventory and Columbus

Several tools and methods for source code quality assurance based on static analysis finally reached a state when they are applicable in practice and recognized by the industry. However, most of these tools are used in an isolated manner and very rarely as organic parts of the quality assurance process. Furthermore, little or no help is provided in interpreting the outputs of these tools. This paper presents SourceInventory, a system for source code-based software quality assessment and monitoring, which is able to collect, store and present measurement data including metrics, coding problems and other kinds of data like bug numbers and test coverage information. It helps software developers, architects and managers to take control over their softwares quality by performing continuous code scans, fault detection, coding style verification, architecture violation detection, and automatic report generation considering metric baselines.

Source Code Metrics and Maintainability: A Case Study

Measuring high level quality attributes of operation-critical IT systems is essential for keeping the maintainability costs under control. International standards and recommendations, like ISO/IEC 9126, give some guidelines regarding the different quality characteristics to be assessed, however, they do not define unambiguously their relationship to the low level quality attributes. The vast majority of existing quality models use source code metrics for measuring low level quality attributes. Although, a lot of researches analyze the relation of source code metrics to other objective measures, only a few studies deal with their expressiveness of subjective feelings of IT professionals. Our research involved 35 IT professionals and manual evaluation results of 570 class methods of an industrial and an open source Java system. Several statistical models have been built to evaluate the relation of low level source code metrics and high level subjective opinions of IT experts. A decision tree based classifier achieved a precision of over 76% during the estimation of the Changeability ISO/IEC 9126 attribute.

Towards Portable Metrics-based Models for Software Maintenance Problems

The usage of software metrics for various purposes has become a hot research topic in academia and industry (e.g. detecting design patterns and bad smells, studying change-proneness, quality and maintainability, predicting faults). Most of these topics have one thing in common: they are all using some kind of metrics-based models to achieve their goal. Unfortunately, only few researchers have tested these models on unknown software systems so far. This paper tackles the question, which metrics are suitable for preparing portable models (which can be efficiently applied to unknown software systems). We have assessed several metrics on four large software systems and we found that the well-known RFC and WMC metrics differentiate the analyzed systems fairly well. Consequently, these metrics cannot be used to build portable models, while the CBO, LCOM and LOC metrics behave similarly on all systems, so they seem to be suitable for this purpose

Development of a Methodology, Software -- Suite and Service for Supporting Software Architecture Reconstruction

Having an up-to-date knowledge of the architecture of a software system is of primary importance, since it affects every aspect of software development. It aids under-standing the system, helps defining high level conditions and constraints for making decisions, supports dependency analysis, logical grouping of components, evaluation of high level design, etc. During the evolution of a software, the documentation of its architecture may not be maintained because of the strict deadlines, resulting in an increasing gap between the architectural design and implementation. The national grant project named GOP-1.1.1-07/1-2008-0077 sponsored by the New Hungarian Development Plan, supports the development of appropriate tools for automatic architecture reconstruction and reverse engineering of software systems. The project will result in a complex solution for automatic architecture reconstruction of software systems by offering both a flexible and highly customizable set of services and a state-of-the-art boxed product. On one hand, architecture reconstruction in the scope of the project deals with visualization of the components and their relations. On the other hand, tracking the changes of the architectural elements during software evolution will also be supported. The tools of the project are being developed by FrontEndART Ltd. while the theoretical and technological background is provided by the Department of Software Engineering at University of Szeged.

Source Meter Sonar Qube Plug-in

The SourceMeter Sonar Qube plug-in is an extension of Sonar Qube, an open-source platform for managing code quality made by Sonar Source S.A, Switzerland. The plug-in extends the built-in Java code analysis engine of Sonar Qube with Front End ARTs high-end Java code analysis engine. Most of Sonar Qubes original analysis results are replaced (including the detected source code duplications), while the range of available analyses is extended with a number of additional metrics and issue detectors. Additionally, the plug-in offers new GUI features on the Sonar Qube dashboard and drilldown views, making the Sonar Qube user experience more comfortable and the work with the tool more productive.