Software Quality Assessment Research Articles

DEVELOPMENT OF A NOVEL OBJECT ORIENTED COHESION METRIC

Class cohesion is considered as one of the most important software quality assessment. Unfortunately, most of cohesion metrics that have been developed do not consider the different intersections among class elements in measuring class cohesion. This paper introduces a novel class cohesion metric which considers the different cohesion intersections. The proposed cohesion metric is tested on more than 35K classes from 16 open-source projects. Experimental results show that the proposed cohesion metric achieves a higher discrimination power along with a vast difference compared with other competitive and well known cohesion metrics. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use the proposed metric for evaluating the software design quality.

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Uncertain Information

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Uncertain Information

A benchmarking-inspired approach to determine threshold values for metrics

In order to assess software quality by software metrics, usually, thresholds for metric values are needed. A common problem is to define reasonable threshold values. One possible solution is to use a benchmarking approach: the threshold value for a metric is calculated based on the metric values of a set of systems, which are called benchmarking base. A relevant question is, how the used benchmarking base inuences the result of the software quality assessment. Based on the quality assessment approach of Quamoco, we conduct a series of experiments, using different benchmarking bases. For each benchmarking base a quality assessment of a series of test systems is conducted. We analyze the whether the quality assessment results of the test systems are concordant for different benchmarking bases. The main findings are: (1) The bigger the benchmarking base, the less divergent are the rankings, and the less is the variance of the results. (2) The size of the systems contained within a benchmarking base does not inuence the results, i.e. a benchmarking base containing small systems works equally well for small and large systems, and vice versa. These results show that benchmarking is a feasible approach for determining threshold values.

Evaluation and Application of Package Level Metrics in Assessing Software Quality

Today almost all the software industries are overloaded with the maintenance work of already developed software. When any new demand of software arrives, company matches the new problem with the existing product, so that the new product can be easily developed with some new modification in existing products. The reuse of the existing product is only possible when it is measured accurately and efficiently for a longer period. In this paper, first we will calculate the class level metrics viz. CBO, RFC, WMC etc for the entire package then we will calculate the average value for each class level metric (selected) by dividing the value for each metric from the total number of classes for each package. The new resultant metrics are named as CBOavg, RFCavg, WMCavg and so on. The importance of these metrics is to accurately measure the complexity at package level. We then map these package level class metrics with the quality attributes and finally validate these metrics upon three open source projects i.e. Jedit, FreeCS and Llamma chart. Data extraction has been done through an automated tool JHawk and analysis of data has been done using SPSS 10.0 as statistical tool. General Terms Software Engineering

Using Process Elicitation and Validation to Understand and Improve Chemotherapy Ordering and Delivery

Chemotherapy ordering and administration, in which errors have potentially severe consequences, was quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated by employing process formalism (or formal process definition), a technique derived from software engineering, to elicit and rigorously describe the process, after which validation techniques were applied to confirm the accuracy of the described process. The chemotherapy ordering and administration process, including exceptional situations and individuals' recognition of and responses to those situations, was elicited through informal, unstructured interviews with members of an interdisciplinary team. The process description (or process definition), written in a notation developed for software quality assessment purposes, guided process validation (which consisted of direct observations and semistructured interviews to confirm the elicited details for the treatment plan portion of the process). The overall process definition yielded 467 steps; 207 steps (44%) were dedicated to handling 59 exceptional situations. Validation yielded 82 unique process events (35 new expected but not yet described steps, 16 new exceptional situations, and 31 new steps in response to exceptional situations). Process participants actively altered the process as ambiguities and conflicts were discovered by the elicitation and validation components of the study. Chemotherapy error rates declined significantly during and after the project, which was conducted from October 2007 through August 2008. Each elicitation method and the subsequent validation discussions contributed uniquely to understanding the chemotherapy treatment plan review process, supporting rapid adoption of changes, improved communication regarding the process, and ensuing error reduction.

Managing Technical Debt with the SQALE Method

To date, several methods are available for estimating the technical debt present in an application's source code. The SQALE (software quality assessment based on life-cycle expectations) method provides guidance for managing this debt. This article provides some implementation recommendations the authors learned from coaching and assisting large organizations in setting up and using SQALE.

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Intuitionistic Trapezoidal Fuzzy Information

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Intuitionistic Trapezoidal Fuzzy Information

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Triangular Fuzzy Information

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Triangular Fuzzy Information

Special issue: software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR 2011)

Special issue: software maintenance and reengineering (CSMR 2011)

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Interval Intuitionistic Trapezoidal Fuzzy Information

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Interval Intuitionistic Trapezoidal Fuzzy Information

Enhancing Defect Tracking Systems to Facilitate Software Quality Improvement

For projects that rely on empirical process control and deliver frequently working versions of software, developers and project managers regularly need to examine the status of their software quality. This study illustrates that simple goal-oriented changes or extensions to the existing data of projects' respective defect tracking systems could provide valuable and prompt information to improve their software quality assessment and assurance.

Altered Fingerprints: Analysis and Detection

The widespread deployment of Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) in law enforcement and border control applications has heightened the need for ensuring that these systems are not compromised. While several issues related to fingerprint system security have been investigated, including the use of fake fingerprints for masquerading identity, the problem of fingerprint alteration or obfuscation has received very little attention. Fingerprint obfuscation refers to the deliberate alteration of the fingerprint pattern by an individual for the purpose of masking his identity. Several cases of fingerprint obfuscation have been reported in the press. Fingerprint image quality assessment software (e.g., NFIQ) cannot always detect altered fingerprints since the implicit image quality due to alteration may not change significantly. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) compiling case studies of incidents where individuals were found to have altered their fingerprints for circumventing AFIS, 2) investigating the impact of fingerprint alteration on the accuracy of a commercial fingerprint matcher, 3) classifying the alterations into three major categories and suggesting possible countermeasures, 4) developing a technique to automatically detect altered fingerprints based on analyzing orientation field and minutiae distribution, and 5) evaluating the proposed technique and the NFIQ algorithm on a large database of altered fingerprints provided by a law enforcement agency. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach in detecting altered fingerprints and highlight the need to further pursue this problem.

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Triangular Fuzzy Linguistic Information

An Approach to Software Quality Assessment with Triangular Fuzzy Linguistic Information

Assessment of Software Quality: Choquet Integral Approach

Software measurement is a software engineering discipline which deals in quantifying the characteristics of a software product or software process. The measurement of the characteristics of software refers to the comparative study of the same and hence the quality of the software comes into picture. There are software quality models made for quantifying various quality parameters such as Boehm's Model, McCall's Model, and ISO/IEC 9126 Model etc but none of these give quantification of quality parameters. Hence this paper proposes a methodology for comparing different software solutions based on the SRS to a common problem. Software quality is highly unpredictable, it is the existence of desirable characteristics in a solution, while the desired attributes differ with different view point and are highly interdependent. Therefore Choquet Integral is used to efficiently compare the set of solutions to be implemented for software.

Comparative Classifiers for Software Quality Assessment

Comparative Classifiers for Software Quality Assessment

Assessing Software Quality Using the Markov Decision Processes

AbstractQuality of software is one of the most critical concerns in software system development, and many products fail to meet the quality objectives when constructed initially. Software quality is highly affected by the development process's actual dynamics. This article proposes the use of the Markov decision process (MDP) for the assessment of software quality because MDP is a useful technique to abstract the model of dynamics of the development process and to test its impact on quality. Additionally, the MDP modeling of the dynamics leads to early prediction of the quality, from the design phases all the way through the different stages of development. The proposed approach is based on the stochastic nature of the software development process, including project architecture, construction strategy of Software Quality Assurance system, its qualification actions, and team assignment strategy. It accepts these factors as inputs, generating a relative quality degree as an output. The proposed approach has been demonstrated for the design phase with a case study taken from the literature. The results prove its robustness and capability to identify appropriate policies in terms of quality, cost, and time. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

BIGpre: A Quality Assessment Package for Next-Generation Sequencing Data

The emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies has significantly improved sequencing throughput and reduced costs. However, the short read length, duplicate reads and massive volume of data make the data processing much more difficult and complicated than the first-generation sequencing technology. Although there are some software packages developed to assess the data quality, those packages either are not easily available to users or require bioinformatics skills and computer resources. Moreover, almost all the quality assessment software currently available didn’t taken into account the sequencing errors when dealing with the duplicate assessment in NGS data. Here, we present a new user-friendly quality assessment software package called BIGpre, which works for both Illumina and 454 platforms. BIGpre contains all the functions of other quality assessment software, such as the correlation between forward and reverse reads, read GC-content distribution, and base Ns quality. More importantly, BIGpre incorporates associated programs to detect and remove duplicate reads after taking sequencing errors into account and trimming low quality reads from raw data as well. BIGpre is primarily written in Perl and integrates graphical capability from the statistics package R. This package produces both tabular and graphical summaries of data quality for sequencing datasets from Illumina and 454 platforms. Processing hundreds of millions reads within minutes, this package provides immediate diagnostic information for user to manipulate sequencing data for downstream analyses. BIGpre is freely available at http://bigpre.sourceforge.net/.

APOLLO: a quality assessment service for single and multiple protein models

Summary: We built a web server named APOLLO, which can evaluate the absolute global and local qualities of a single protein model using machine learning methods or the global and local qualities of a pool of models using a pair-wise comparison approach. Based on our evaluations on 107 CASP9 (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) targets, the predicted quality scores generated from our machine learning and pair-wise methods have an average per-target correlation of 0.671 and 0.917, respectively, with the true model quality scores. Based on our test on 92 CASP9 targets, our predicted absolute local qualities have an average difference of 2.60 Å with the actual distances to native structure.Availability: http://sysbio.rnet.missouri.edu/apollo/. Single and pair-wise global quality assessment software is also available at the site.Contact: chengji@missouri.edu

A study on how usability flaws in GUI design increase mouse movements and consequently may affect users' health

The objective of this study is to discuss how software usability flaws may cause a significant increase in mouse movements and, as a potential side effect, may even affect users' health. During the literature review, this article examines the potential relationship between mouse movement and musculoskeletal disorders of the upper extremity, based on studies from medical sciences. Subsequently, in the main part of the present study, three software products were selected that had at least one usability flaw related to extra mouse movement (the selection of the software was made out of over 20 software programs that had been evaluated in our Software Quality Assessment Laboratory). For these products, all additional mouse movements were measured, involving actual users in various settings and computer configurations. The findings showed that even a single usability flaw may increase mouse movement to a magnitude of between 3.6 and 4.7 m/h. The article concludes that the role of software engineering is to focus on software usability as well, taking into account that a user friendly graphical user interface (GUI) which is able to eliminate unnecessary mouse movement may also eventually contribute to the reduction of fatigue and discomfort, caused by musculoskeletal disorders.

Analysis of quality raw data of second generation sequencers with Quality Assessment Software

BackgroundSecond generation technologies have advantages over Sanger; however, they have resulted in new challenges for the genome construction process, especially because of the small size of the reads, despite the high degree of coverage. Independent of the program chosen for the construction process, DNA sequences are superimposed, based on identity, to extend the reads, generating contigs; mismatches indicate a lack of homology and are not included. This process improves our confidence in the sequences that are generated.FindingsWe developed Quality Assessment Software, with which one can review graphs showing the distribution of quality values from the sequencing reads. This software allow us to adopt more stringent quality standards for sequence data, based on quality-graph analysis and estimated coverage after applying the quality filter, providing acceptable sequence coverage for genome construction from short reads.ConclusionsQuality filtering is a fundamental step in the process of constructing genomes, as it reduces the frequency of incorrect alignments that are caused by measuring errors, which can occur during the construction process due to the size of the reads, provoking misassemblies. Application of quality filters to sequence data, using the software Quality Assessment, along with graphing analyses, provided greater precision in the definition of cutoff parameters, which increased the accuracy of genome construction.