Quantitative analysis of software quality during the "design and implementation" phase

Abstract

An approach for quantitative evaluation of software quality during the "design and implementation" phase of the software life cycle is presented. This evaluation starts by defining a set of software quality characteristics, viz. usability, efficiency and complexity. Each of these attributes is assessed through a set of software quality metrics, such as completeness, communicativeness, conciseness, accessibility and device efficiency. The software quality metric is then, in turn, evaluated through a checklist consisting of a detailed questionnaire. The multi-element component comparison and analysis (MECCA) method has been used for quantitative analysis. This analysis provides a quantitative measure, which reflects the figure of merit or degree of excellence of software quality during the design and implementation phase.