Tool Support for Continuous Quality Controlling

Software systems over time suffer from a gradual quality decay and therefore costs rise if no pro-active countermeasures are taken. Quality controlling is the first step to avoid this cost trap. Continuous quality assessments enable the early identification of quality problems, when their removal is still inexpensive, and aid in making adequate decisions as they provide an integrated view on the current status of a software system. As a side effect, continuous and timely feedback enables developers and maintainers to improve their skills and thereby helps to avoid future quality defects. To make regular quality controlling feasible, it has to be highly automated and assessment results need to be presented in an aggregated manner to not overwhelm users with too much data. This article gives an overview of tools that aim at solving these issues. As an example, we present the flexible, open source toolkit ConQAT that supports the creation of dashboards for quality controlling and report on its application.