Tool Support for Continuous Quality Assessment

Maintenance costs make up the bulk of the total life cycle costs of a software system. Besides organizational issues such as knowledge management and turnover, the long-term maintenance costs are largely predetermined by various quality attributes of the software system itself such as redundancy and adequate documentation. Unfortunately, many quality defects can hardly be corrected retrospectively after they have penetrated the system. A much more promising approach than correction is to avoid decay and to preserve a constant high level of quality through a continuous real-time quality controlling process. To reduce the costs for the required frequent quality assessments, adequate tool support is indispensable. This paper proposes to integrate measurement tools into a flexible and extensible yet high performance quality assessment tool. We present the design and implementation of this tool and report on our experiences made with it in a medium-sized academical project. Among the positive effects are improved software product quality and reduced efforts for manual quality assessments as well as increased awareness for quality issues