Software Quality Metrics

What is Software Quality Metrics?

The word ‘metrics‘ refer to standards for measurements. Software Quality Metrics means measurement of attributes, pertaining to software quality along with its process of development.

The term “software quality metrics” illustrate the picture of measuring the software qualities by recording the number of defects or security loopholes present in the software. However, quality measurement is not restricted to counting of defects or vulnerabilities but also covers other aspects of the qualities such as maintainability, reliability, integrity, usability, customer satisfaction, etc.

Why Software Quality Metrics?

1. To define and categorize elements in order to have better understanding of each and every process and attribute.
2. To evaluate and assess each of these process and attribute against the given requirements and specifications.
3. Predicting and planning the next move w.r.t software and business requirements.
4. Improving the Overall quality of the process and product, and subsequently of project.

What are the quality factors that define & impact the user experience?

Software Quality Metrics: sub-category of Software Metrics

It is basically, a subclass of software metrics that mainly emphasizes on quality assets of the software product, process and project. Software metric is a broader concept that incorporates software quality metrics in it, and mainly consists of three types of metrics:

• Product Metrics:

  It includes size, design, complexity, performance and other parameters that are associated with the product’s quality.
• Process Metrics:

  It involves parameters like, time-duration in locating and removing defects, response time for resolving issues, etc.

• Project Metrics:

  It may include number of teams, developers involved, cost and duration for the project, etc.

Methodology Of Software Quality Metrics

The methodology behind software quality metric is as under:

• Identify and prepare the list of possible requirements of quality, and subsequently, assigning direct metric, such as understanding, learning and operation time, to each of these requirements.
• Apply metrics framework, along with the cost-benefit analysis.
• Implementing metrics via collecting and defining data to compute metric values.
• Interpret and analyse the results, to ensure the fulfilment of requirements.
• Validate the metrics through validation methodology and thereafter proper documentation of the results.

Features of good Software Quality Metrics

• Should be specific to measure the particular attribute or an attribute of greater importance.
• Comprehensive for wide variety of scenarios.
• Should not consider attributes that have already been measured by some other metric.
• Reliable to work similarly in all conditions.
• Should be easy and simple to understand and operate.

It is not possible to manage anything until you can’t measure it. Software quality metric provides an effective way to manage the quality of the larger processes of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) along with task of managing the software quality throughout the development cycle.

Software Quality Infographics

Read our related article software quality to have better insight to software quality metrics.