Measuring software quality may seem like an easy task. If you’ve got what expected, you can consider the quality of the project is good.
However, it’s not always that simple. Usually, customers have a lot of questions once the project is completed. Let’s see, what questions are the most frequent and find out how both a customer and an offshore developer can measure the quality of the software.
Whose satisfaction with the project to take into account?
Here are three possible options:
- users – people who will use the product;
- developers – people who build the software product;
- customer – business/people who ordered custom development.
Traditionally, users pay more attention to the usability whereas developers are deeply concerned for the technical part of the project.
What quality aspects to consider?
Usually, customers pay high software development costs for custom products. It’s no wonder that they want to know how to evaluate the quality of the end product. Below is a list of things that are considered most often when measuring the quality of the project.
Functionality
- Suitability – how suitable the software is for the organization needs.
- Correctness – the accuracy of meeting the requirements for software functionality.
- Interoperability – software integration capabilities.
- Consistency – the quality of software interaction with other software used in the organization; the possibility of sharing and the absence of negative influence on each other.
- Security – how much software is protected from hacking and unauthorized access.
Usability
- Comprehensibility – how easy the software is to use.
- Learning – how easy it is to teach the user how to use the software.
- Usage practice – how user-friendly the software is for users.
Reliability
- Stability – maintaining software functionality when changing the external environment.
- Error tolerance – the ability of the software to function when errors are detected.
- Recoverability is the ability of the software to recover in the event of a failure that does not disrupt the organization.
Portability
- Adaptability – the ability of software to migrate to a new infrastructure.
- Ease of implementation – the level of effort that you have to spend on implementing software.
- Compliance is a set of infrastructure and system components on which software can run.
Maintainability
- Analyzability is the simplicity of analyzing the functioning of the software, in particular, the causes of errors and critical situations.
- Flexibility – ease of changing the software in accordance with the needs of the organization.
- Testability – ease of testing software when making changes to it.
What Metrics to Use?
Development teams can use different metrics to assess the quality of the project. Here are the most popular metrics:
Defect Density Metric is used to decide if the software can be released. It is a number of defects which were detected and confirmed within a certain time frame. Defects are counted per 1000 lines of code.
The Lines of Code (LOC) Metric is used to determine the size of the product by calculating the number of code lines. It may seem simple. However, there are several ways to count the number of lines:
- physical lines – excludes attributes and visual basic form definitions;
- physical lines of code – excludes comments and empty lines;
- logical lines – made of one or multiple physical lines;
- logical lines of code – excludes comments and empty lines;
- statements – counts statements, not lines.
What project is considered large? Here’s an example of a classification of the project scope.
Small – 0-9.999 lines
Medium – 10.000-49.999 lines
Semi-large – 50.000-99.999 lines
Large – 100.000-499.999 lines
Very large – 500.000+
Defect Tracking Metric is used to detect as many errors and bugs as possible. What is taken into account?
- total number of bugs;
- fixed bugs;
- new bugs per week;
- fixes per week.
Function Points Metric is used to assess the system’s business functionality by determining the correlation between external inputs, outputs, inquiries and internal and external files.
Customer Satisfaction Metrics are used to define how much customers are satisfied with the product. These metrics include:
In-Process Quality Metrics are used to monitor defects during testing. In-process quality metrics include metrics for software maintenance (fix backlog, fix response time, fix responsiveness, fix quality, etc.).
Measuring conformance to initial requirements is important if you want to improve your software development life cycle. Measure the quality to deliver the products with high performance, scalability, and great usability.
