Tools for metrics used to evaluate software quality. (c2006)

Abstract

Software Quality relies on attributes such as: Complexity, efficiency, maintainability, reusability and others. For evaluating such quality attributes, Metrics have been proposed, e.g.: the weighted methods per class, the depth of inheritance tree, the number of children of a class, etc... The process of controlling quality of a particular computer system through such metrics computation requires the use of some related tools that serve as software quality evaluators; their use has a major impact on the quality of the software to be developed, as they can provide guidelines for future designs. Throughout this paper, we will first define what software quality and its attributes are, point out their importance in an Object-Oriented paradigm and how they could be estimated and evaluated. We will then present a survey of some available tools, used to interpret software systems quality. While many of these tools in the market seem to be interesting to use, we will only describe in details the functionality and specifications of the ones we can possibly reach.