A Case Study Using CBR-Insight to Visualize Source Code Quality

Creating and maintaining high-quality source code is especially important for critical systems such as those made for NASA and the DoD, and for software product lines where long-lived, reusable modules are intended to be shared by multiple systems. CBR-Insight is an automated code assessment tool developed for the US Air Force, and released as open source on GitHub, to provide an objective and understandable measure of software quality. CBRI-Insight supports the ability of technical and non-technical decision makers to verify that a project's software implementation follows through on promises around developing and sustaining reliable and maintainable software while managing technical debt. The primary contributions of this work include advancing the state of the art in assessing software code quality, presenting a method to communicate code quality to decision makers, and examining a case study where these methods are applied to develop software in the aerospace domain.