This paper shows how Quality Costs can be a measure of software quality. The relationship between Quality Costs and other software quality metrics is briefly explained, and software development oriented versions of the two principal Quality Cost models are described. Finally the paper discusses the major issues involved in setting up a software Quality Cost programme. The concepts are based on ...

Product based organizations have diverse product offerings that meet various business needs. The products are in turn integrated to create integrated product suites. Rigorous product engineering is a must for creation of high quality integrated software products. Adequate measures must be taken to improve quality of the integrated product before every release of its module or sub-product. It is...

Software metric data model has always been restructured, redefined to fit their respective software metrics, and yet it will never been permanently shaped. It is important to have a generic data model to handle software measurement data in digital format that can actually help making software metrics definition in future much robust, definable and structured. In this paper software metric data ...

Design-time use of software fault tree analysis allows designers to focus on safety critical system aspects early in the software development process. This paper presents a technique for evaluating the impact of software fault tree 'key nodes' requiring multiple inputs to fail before the hazard propagates through the system. A heuristics-based key node metric providing a design tool with which ...

Testability is an important quality characteristic of software. A lack of testability contributes to a higher test and maintenance effort. Metrics can be used locate parts of a program which contribute to a lack of testability. In this paper we present a new approach to define metrics for software dependencies. We use this approach in the context of testability to identify test-critical depende...

Software process improvement is seen by many as a viable strategy for overcoming the software crisis. It is, however, difficult to determine the actual effect of such improvement efforts. This paper reports from an organization that is implementing a software metrics program with the expressed purpose of measuring the effects of their improvement project. The metrics program is intended to meas...

Context: Software defect prediction plays a crucial role in estimating the most defect-prone components of software, and a large number of studies have pursued improving prediction accuracy within a project or across projects. However, the rules for making an appropriate decision between withinand cross-project defect prediction when available historical data are insufficient remain unclear. Ob...

Software metrics can provide an automated way for software practitioners to assess the quality of their software. The earlier in the software development lifecycle this information is available, the more valuable it is, since changes are much more expensive to make later in the lifecycle. As far as the ComponentBased Software Engineering is concerned, the metrics can help estimate, plan and ide...

In the area of software measurement, tool support/integration and automation are considered key aspects of metric programs. While many tools exist to extract metrics from certain software artefacts, there is no single tool to cover metric data collection during the whole software process because of typically heterogeneous and ever-changing environments. To achieve full life-cycle coverage, inst...

The importance of metric measures has been recognized in almost every scientific and engineering discipline, including software engineering where much progress in this application has been made. In this paper, metric measures are studied for their application to expert systems, for which little work has been done. The characteristics and organization of metric measures are discussed and present...