Improving interpretation of component-based systems quality through visualisation techniques

Component-based software development is increasingly more commonplace and is widely used in the development of commercial software systems. This has led to the existence of several research works focusing on software component-based systems quality. The majority of this research proposes quality models focused on component-based systems in which different measures are proposed. In general, the result of assessing the measures is a number, which is necessary to determine the component-based system quality level. However, understanding and interpreting the data set is not an easy task. In order to facilitate the interpretation of results, this study selects and adapts a specific visual metaphor with which to show component-based systems quality. A tool has additionally been developed which permits the automatic assessment of the measures to be carried out. The tool also shows the results visually and proposes corrective actions through which to improve the level of quality. A case study is used to assess and to show the quality of a real-world component-based software system in a graphic manner.