Software quality and CASE tools

Vendors often claim that productivity and quality improvements are benefits of CASE technology. In particular lower defect rates and reduced maintenance are cited as benefits during the construction phase of the systems development lifecycle. However there is little empirical evidence to support these claims. The current research examines the impact of both back-end and integrated CASE tools on the quality of the resultant application using the ISO/IEC 9126 quality definition. The results suggest that the quality of software developed using CASE tools is better than conventionally developed systems with respect to reliability, maintainability and portability but the degree of improvement is affected by the particular CASE tool used for development