Software Quality Measurement

Software measurement helps to quantify the quality and the effectiveness of software to find areas of improvement and to provide information needed to make appropriate decisions. In the recent studies, software metrics are widely used for quality assessment. These metrics are divided into two categories: syntactic and semantic. A literature review shows that syntactic ones are widely discussed and are generally used to measure software internal attributes like complexity. It also shows a lack of studies that focus on measuring external attributes like using internal ones. This chapter presents a thorough analysis of most quality measurement concepts. Moreover, it makes a comparative study of object-oriented syntactic metrics to identify their effectiveness for quality assessment and in which phase of the development process these metrics may be used. As reliability is an external attribute, it cannot be measured directly. In this chapter, the authors discuss how reliability can be measured using its correlation with syntactic metrics.