Assessing Software Quality in High Energy and Nuclear Physics: the Geant4 and ROOT Case Studies and Beyond

Quality of software is the key to successful software development and physics results transparency. An original method to assess the quality of scientific software systems objectively has been developed. A set of established software metrics is combined with statistical analysis methods, such as trend analysis and inequality and diversity measures, to quantify various characteristics of the code, such as maintainability. This methodology, previously applied to Geant4, has now been employed to assess the quality of ROOT, a software system for big data processing, statistical analysis, visualisation and storage frequently used in particle and nuclear physics experiments. Preliminary results of the analysis of ROOT software quality are presented.