The use of software quality metrics in the materiel release process - Experience report

The US Army's Tank-Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center's Next Generation Software Engineering Life Cycle Support Activity (NextGen) is responsible for determining the suitability of software for release to the field. Determining the software is suitable for materiel release includes ensuring the software is safe, operationally suitable, and logistically supportable. The Next Generation Team incorporates a thorough and well-defined process for evaluating software for materiel release that includes a detailed review of all documentation, a walk-through of a representative sample of source code, and the automated collection of several source code metrics using AdaSTAT(TM), a commercially available software metrics tool for Ada. The metrics collected include source lines of code, cyclomatic and essential complexity, Halstead measures, and a maintainability index. Taken together, these metrics provide a valuable indication of the overall maintainability and supportability of the software. The metrics are presented using a Kiviat analysis, which provides a graphical display of the state of a module with respect to predefined limit values.