Literature review on software metrics and a New Proposal

Abstract

The use of metrics is important in software development activities as they make it possible to check quality, identify failures and other benefits. The objective of this paper is to propose a new software metric based on a bibliometric study and a literature review on software metrics. The bibliometric research was carried out in the Scopus and Web of Science databases to identify the distribution of articles by year of publication, the main authors, affiliation, country, the most common languages, the types of documents, journals with more publications, areas of knowledge, and the keyword clusters. Twenty-three articles were subsequently selected for reading to compose the literature review. The results of the bibliometric research show that (i) there is no defined core of research; (ii) there is a fluctuation of the number of published articles; (iii) the predominant language is English, and the country with the highest index of publications is the United States; (iv) the main area of knowledge is computer science; (v) in relation to affiliation, Florida Atlantic University stands out; (vi) the journal with the largest number of publications is the Journal of Systems and Software. The literature review showed that many software metrics can be used for different purposes, but most of them are related to code, and none are related to acceptance. As such, a support metric for the software acceptance process is proposed to facilitate the delivery phase of the software product, providing security for the customer and cost savings for the developing company.