A Real-Life Database for Software Metrics

Maintenance costs of Information Systems (ISs) are high and are growing. Part of the costs come from low software quality. The quality of software can be measured when it is maintained. By improving the quality of maintenance prone modules future maintenance costs may be lowered for those modules. In this article we will discuss how to measure software quality and we will also present a prototype of a software quality metrics database that has been set up to especially focus on software maintenance cost information. Keywords Software quality, measurement tool for IS management, software metrics, metrics database 1 Introduction The fact is that most of the yearly software budget is normally spent on maintenance of existing information systems [Art88, Boe81, LS80]. Systems of poor quality demand more maintenance resources than systems of good quality. Development of new systems without strict requirement for quality control supported by quality measuring will lead to even bigger needs ..