Page 196 - SOFTWARE TESTING & QUALITY ASSURANCE

Unit 13: Quality Management in Organisation

Quality metrics play an important role in statistical quality assurance. The defects that are observed
during the maintenance phase are recorded and detailed information about the cause of the defect is
identified, so that the right corrective action can be taken. Metrics also helps in identifying defect trends,
thereby helping to plan for their prevention.
Metrics are required to know the health of the process and the project in an organization. Metrics
actually check whether the quality standards set by an organization for a particular project is achieved
in a systematic way or not.
There are two types of metrics, namely:
1. Product Metrics: Product metrics usually measure the readiness and completeness of the
software.

Product metrics measures the final size of the program or the number of pages
documented in a particular stage of software development.

2. Process Metrics: Process metrics measure the overall software development process.

Time taken for overall development of a product, type of methodology used, or
the average level of experience of the programming staff.

Different organizations follow different dimensions to measure the software quality of their product.
The most common software metrics followed by organizations are:
1. Code Coverage
2. Bugs Per Line of Code
3. Cyclometric Complexity
4. Function Point Analysis
5. Number of Classes and Interfaces
6. Cohesion

7. Coupling
8. Order of Growth
9. Source Lines of Code

The metrics used to measure the complexity of a software module which have
been already developed are the McCabe’s cyclometric complexity measure and
the Halstead’s measure of conciseness.

The McCabe’s cyclometric complexity measure is used to measure the complexity of a software module,
as it is very difficult to rewrite the software program that has been already completed. To have a better
understanding about the complexity of measures, rules are created to ensure low complexity of the
programs during the design and coding phase.
Software Quality Indicators
Management concerns can also be addressed with the help of quality indicators. Some of the
recommended quality indicators are:
1. Progress: It measures the amount of work done by the developer in each phase.
2. Stability: It evaluates whether the products of each phase are adequately stable to proceed to the
next phase.

3. Process Compliance: It measures the developer’s obedience with the development procedures
approved during the start of the project.

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