International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing empirically the quality evolution of an open source software using metrics. We used a control flow based metric (<i>Quality Assurance Indicator</i> - Qi) which we proposed in a previous work. We wanted to investigate if the Qi metric can be used to observe how quality evolves along the evolution of the successive released versions of the subject software system. We addressed software quality from an internal perspective. We performed an empirical analysis using historical data on the subject system (Apache Tomcat). The collected data cover, in fact, a period of more than seven years (thirty-one versions in total). Empirical results provide evidence that the Qi metric reflects properly the quality evolution of the subject system.