Investigating the impact of a measurement program on software quality

ContextMeasurement programs have been around for several decades but have been often misused or misunderstood by managers and developers. This misunderstanding prevented their adoption despite their many advantages.ObjectiveIn this paper, we present the results of an empirical study on the impact of a measurement program, MQL (“Mise en Qualité du Logiciel”, French for “Quality Software Development”), in an industrial context.MethodWe analyzed data collected on 44 industrial systems of different sizes: 22 systems were developed using MQL while the other 22 used ad-hoc approaches to assess and control quality (control group, referred to as “ad-hoc systems”). We studied the impact of MQL on a set of nine variables: six quality factors (maintainability, evolvability, reusability, robustness, testability, and architecture quality), corrective-maintenance effort, code complexity, and the presence of comments.ResultsOur results show that MQL had a clear positive impact on all the studied indicators. This impact is statistically significant for all the indicators but corrective-maintenance effort.ConclusionWe bring concrete evidence that a measurement program can have a significant, positive impact on the quality of software systems if combined with appropriate decision making procedures and corrective actions.