Software quality analysis system: a new approach

Many firms have to face up to important software costs because of the maintenance activities of aging software. The key to reducing these maintenance costs is to apply software renovation tools and methodologies which will improve the program's intrinsic quality. The basic idea of the methodology presented here is to establish a diagnosis based on the program quality analysis. The use of the alone static analysers to evaluate software quality is insufficient. Most of them are based only on technical attributes characterizing the software application and offer a fragmentary approach of quality. Therefore, the author suggests a quality analysis based on metrics but supplemented by "checklists" covering all the quality criteria of the programs and taking into account the semantic aspects which are not covered by the static analysers. To implement these checklists, the author proposes a knowledge-based system which integrates both semantic and syntactic aspects. The diagnosis based on the program quality analysis results will help the software practitioner to determine if the program under review has to be reengineered or can be used as is or has to be redeveloped completely.