Assessing software product maintainability based on class-level structural measures
PROFES'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement
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The US Army's Tank-Automotive Research Developmentand Engineering Center's Next Generation SoftwareEngineering Life Cycle Support Activity (NextGen) isresponsible for determining the suitability of software forrelease to the field. Determining the software is suitablefor materiel release includes ensuring the software issafe, operationally suitable, and logistically supportable.The Next Generation Team incorporates a thorough andwell-defined process for evaluating software for materielrelease that includes a detailed review of alldocumentation, a walk-through of representativesample of source code, and the automated collection ofseveral source code metrics using AdaSTATTM, acommercially available software metrics tool for Ada.The metrics collected include source lines of code,cyclomatic and essential complexity, Halstead measures,and a maintainability index. Taken together, thesemetrics provide a valuable indication of the overallmaintainability and supportability of the software. Themetrics are presented using a Kiviat analysis, whichprovides graphical display of the state of a module withrespect to predefined limit values.