What Happened to Software Metrics?

Published

May 25, 2017

Author(s)

Jeffrey M. Voas, David R. Kuhn

Abstract

In the 1980's, the software quality community was all 'a buzz' with seemingly endless 'potential' approaches for producing higher quality software. At the forefront of that was software metrics, along with the corresponding software testing techniques and tools and process improvement schemes that relied on the software metrics. We asked a panel of 7 software metrics experts 11 questions to help explain the last 40 years of software measurement and where they believe we stand today. Our experts are: (1) Taghi Khoshgoftaar (Florida Atlantic University), (2) Edward F. Miller (Software Research, Inc.), (3) Vic Basili (University of Maryland, retired), (4) Jim Bieman (Colorado State University), (5) Ram Chillarege (Chillarege, Inc.), (6) Adam Porter (Fraunhofer Institute), and (7) Alain Abran (University of Quebec). We did not ask rhetorical questions, but rather questions that we believe remain unanswered, and if answered, could form a foundation into improved or new software metrics and software measurement.

Citation

Computer (IEEE Computer)

Volume

50

Issue

5

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2017.144

Keywords

software quality, software metrics, software testing, software testing tools, source lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, Halstead metric, software measurement

Citation

Voas, J. and Kuhn, D. (2017), What Happened to Software Metrics?, Computer (IEEE Computer), [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2017.144 (Accessed April 27, 2024)