I received some weeks ago a copy of the Master thesis from J.H. Hegeman at the University of Twente in Netherland. “Quality of Quality models”. Since a couple of weeks, an unrestricted version is now available here.
This is an impressive (150 pages) and very interesting work that I recommend. Here are some extracts of the executive summary:
This project investigates the usability of the SQALE method at software company Info Support BV.
This method allows Info Support to measure the quality of Java and C# source code. We learned that
SQALE, as implemented in the Sonar tool, provides a workable method to perform this quality assessment for projects of both languages…
…
The investigation was performed by correlating SQALE quality judgments of 9 Info Support managed software projects with two types of validation data…
…
This leads to the conclusion that in general, the methods provides quality measurements that are valid. A number of side nodes should be made:
1. The method configuration is very flexible, and configuring is therefore a difficult task. This thesis suggests a number of options to enhance the configuration and possibly further increase correlation with validation data;
2. A higher correlation coefficient was found to not always imply a better configuration quality.
A starting-point configuration, consistent with the Endeavour rule set, and the use of a continuous improvement procedure is suggested.
The choice for the SQALE model and Sonar tool followed from a literature review and free search on
the internet, respectively. The method allows Info Support to not only determine the overall quality,
but also provides a rating for four important quality aspects, consistent with ISO 9126…
The thesis also contains some proposals for extending the SQALE methods.
These proposals have been taken into account within the new version of SQALE (coming soon).
