Quality in software development: a pragmatic approach using metrics

As long as software has been produced, there have been efforts to strive for quality in software products. In order to understand quality in software products, researchers have built models of software quality that rely on metrics in an attempt to provide a quantitative view of software quality. The aim of these models is to provide software producers with the capability to define and evaluate metrics related to quality and use these metrics to improve the quality of the software they produce over time. The main disadvantage of these models is that they require effort and resources to define and evaluate metrics from software projects. This article briefly describes some prominent models of software quality in the literature and continues to describe a new approach to gaining insight into quality in software development projects. A case study based on this new approach is described and results from the case study are discussed.