Towards a catalog format for software metrics

Abstract

In the past two decades both the industry and the research community have proposed hundreds of metrics to track software projects, evaluate quality or estimate effort. Unfortunately, it is not always clear which metric works best in a particular context. Even worse, for some metrics there is little evidence whether the metric measures the attribute it was designed to measure.In this paper we propose a catalog format for software metrics as a first step towards a consolidated overview of available software metrics. This format is designed to provide an overview of the status of a metric in a glance, while providing enough information to make an informed decision about the use of the metric. We envision this format to be implemented in a (semantic) wiki to ensure that relationships between metrics can be followed with ease.

Multi‐criteria decision‐making approach for modular enterprise resource planning sorting problems

“…Maintainability is considered as a crucial prerequisite for lifelong evolution of systems on the basis of efficient updating of their related software (Vogel-Heuser & Ocker, 2018), and is derived from particular source code metrics as indicators (Hegedűs et al, 2018). As observed by Saraiva et al (2015), a considerable number of product metrics has been proposed for software maintainability assessment in the literature, what poses a decision-making challenge for practitioners and researchers with relation to gain a consolidated overview about available and practically beneficial software metrics (Bouwers et al, 2014). Atalag et al (2014) recognize as even tiny improvements in maintainability can be translated into considerable cost savings and product reliability increase.…”

Metric-based Measurement and Selection for Software Product Quality Assessment: Qualitative Expert Interviews

“…4) Limited measurement metric resources: Previous works proposed several numbers of metrics for software measurement and assessment but the application and implementation of these metrics in real environment is ambiguous without systematic guideline of the usage [2][12] [45]. There is no guideline for metric selection based on organisational strategy and goal.…”

“…Software metrics will affect the measurement program and eliminating inaccurate metrics will improve software performance and reduce wastage [10]. However, there is no consensus on which metrics are relevant and worth for selection [2][5] [12] [13].…”

“…It is also found that a very high failure rate in metric implementation which is 66.7%. Even though software metric has been introduced by previous researchers, managing and maintaining the assessment program is a challenge and mostly because of lack of commitment from staff [16], no guideline for implementation [17], lack of experts [15] and also there is no metric repository for effective and efficient metric selection to the practitioners and stakeholders [2][5] [12]. This paper presents the qualitative expert interviews and findings on software product quality assessment based on metric-based measurement from industrial perspectives.…”

Classifying metrics for assessing Object-Oriented Software Maintainability: A family of metrics’ catalogs

“…as a first step towards a consolidated overview of available software metrics [56]. They analyzed the past two decades of metrics proposal, and showed how difficult is to evaluate or estimate effort to measure software.…”