Quality Assessment in the Cloud: Is It Worthwhile?

As software systems become increasingly complex, the aspects of quality that we want to assess become increasingly diverse, requiring the usage of a significant number of tools. Therefore, the installation and proper configuration of these various analysis tools, as well as running them on local computers for large-scale systems becomes more and more a significant investment both in terms of time and computing power. In this paper we present how the infrastructure and services that are developed within the HOST project could be employed to facilitate the extensive use of quality assessment tools. We present the HOST service functionality infrastructure by showing how INFUSION, a popular tool for detecting design flaws, has been integrated and used there. The paper presents the performance improvements due to running INFUSION within a cloud infrastructure and discusses the trade-offs of moving software analysis tools in the cloud.