Evaluating Software Product Quality: A Systematic Mapping Study

Evaluating software product quality (SPQ) is an important task to ensure the quality of software products. In this paper a systematic mapping study was performed to summarize the existing SPQ evaluation (SPQE) approaches in literature and to classify the selected studies according to seven classification criteria: SPQE approaches, research types, empirical types, data sets used in the empirical evaluation of these studies, artifacts, SQ models, and SQ characteristics. Publication channels and trends were also identified. 57 papers were selected. The results show that the main publication sources of the papers identified were journals. Data mining techniques are the most frequently approaches reported in literature. Solution proposals were the main research type identified. The majority of the selected papers were history-based evaluations using existing data, which were mainly obtained from open source software projects and domain specific projects. Source code was the main artifacts used by SPQE approaches. Well-known SQ models were mentioned by half of the selected papers and reliability is the SQ characteristic through which SPQE was mainly achieved. SPQE-related subjects seem to attract more interest from researchers since the past years.