Are comprehensive quality models necessary for evaluating software quality?

Klaus Lochmann, Jasmin Ramadani, Stefan Wagner

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

The concept of software quality is very complex and has many facets. Reecting all these facets and at the same time measuring everything related to these facets results in comprehensive but large quality models and extensive mea-surements. In contrast, there are also many smaller, focused quality models claiming to evaluate quality with few mea-sures. We investigate if and to what extent it is possible to build a focused quality model with similar evaluation results as a comprehensive quality model but with far less measures needed to be collected and, hence, reduced effort. We make quality evaluations with the comprehensive Quamoco base quality model and build focused quality models based on the same set of measures and data from over 2,000 open source systems. We analyse the ability of the focused model to predict the results of the Quamoco model by comparing them with a random predictor as a baseline. We calculate the standardised accuracy measure SA and effect sizes. We found that for the Quamoco model and its 378 auto-matically collected measures, we can build a focused model with only 10 measures but an accuracy of 61% and a medium to high effect size. We conclude that we can build focused quality models to get an impression of a system's quality similar to comprehensive models. However, when including manually collected measures, the accuracy of the models stayed below 50 %. Hence, manual measures seem to have a high impact and should therefore not be ignored in a focused model.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPROMISE 2013 - 9th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450320160
DOIs
StatePublished - 9 Oct 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event9th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering, PROMISE 2013 - Baltimore, United States
Duration: 9 Oct 2013 → …

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series
VolumePart F128822

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering, PROMISE 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore
Period9/10/13 → …

Keywords

  • Quality evaluation
  • Quality model
  • Software quality

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Are comprehensive quality models necessary for evaluating software quality?'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this