Improving software products quality through the use of metrics

Project Information

QUALIMET

Grant agreement ID: 23982

Project closed

Start date 1 March 1997

End date 30 September 1998

Funded under

• Software Best Practice initiative within the framework of the specific research and technological development programme in the field of Information Technologies, 1994-1998

Total cost € 108 000,00

EU contribution € 108 000,00

Coordinated by

Centro Tecnologico ROBOTIKER
Spain

Objective

Quality requirements of industrial software are very high and the correctness of the source code is of great importance for this purpose. Traditionally, the correctness of a program has been checked through an exhaustive set of test cases that usually consider the program as a black box. It is well known that it is impossible to check the whole behaviour of the program through exhaustive tests, so an static analysis of the source code at an early stage can be of great help in order to pay special attention to those parts of the source code that are specially complex or not well written. The objective of QUALIMET is to improve this software development process, introducing a set of style norms to be used when coding in C++, and a set of metrics to be used on the source code in order to check its quality.

THE EXPERIMENT
The QUALIMET experiment will consist on the introduction of a methodology for analysing the correctness of the source code. This experiment will be carried out in the context of the development of a small distributed control system based on a PC network for process monitoring and control. The development in C++ of this small tool, following an object oriented methodology, will be the baseline project. The different aspects of the methodology that will be covered under the experiment are the following:

Definition of a set of style norms to be used when coding in C++.
Selection of software quality measurement tools suitable for their use in C++ source code.
Selection of a set of metrics to be applied on the C++ source code.
Usage of the selected style norms and metrics for C++ in the baseline project's source code.

The conclusions obtained through the experiment will allow to refine its results in order to be used in future applications.

ROBOTIKER employs 99 people, 68% of them are involved in software development.

EXPECTED IMPACT AND EXPERIENCE
After the end of QUALIMET, ROBOTIKER will incorporate these quality assurance techniques into its current methodology for developing software, in order to have a complete methodology that guarantees software products quality, minimising the complexity of the code earlier in the programming process, yielding more maintainable and less error-prone software and improving the quality of the software and the satisfaction of its customers.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• engineering and technology › electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering › electronic engineering › control systems
• natural sciences › computer and information sciences › software › software development

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Programme(s)

• FP4-ESSI 2 - Software Best Practice initiative within the framework of the specific research and technological development programme in the field of Information Technologies, 1994-1998

Topic(s)

• 1.28 - Process Improvement Experiments

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measures

Coordinator

Centro Tecnologico ROBOTIKER

• EU contribution: No data
• Address: Parque Tecnologico, Edificio 202 ; 48170 ZAMUDIO ; Spain
• Total cost: No data