Refine for Quality Assessment

More than twenty year of practice have taught us that measuring software is a futile exercise when it does not lead to concrete actions. Without prior, precise definition of the identified objectives, it is also futile to accumulate measurement results from metrics that are too general and too abstract.

This is why Refine for Quality Assessment allows to:

• select or define (if there are no metrics) the metrics capable of translating the identified objective in concrete terms and with precision; this is thanks to the unequalled expressivity of the refine language.
• simultaneously deploy several guidelines to take each user's role into account and therefore take his needs into account (development, testing, operation, domain manager)
• exploit and translate the results in the form of a work plan on legacy associated with an evaluation of the workload.

The figure below provides the details of the main stages in the life cycle of legacy measurement.

Publishing the measurement guidelines

Because measurement tools must be able to translate:

• the identified objective: simplification of code, quality control, delocalization, etc.
• the role of each user in the organization
• the state of perpetual development in software to be measured

Refine for Quality Assessment allows its users to select and put together the most relevant metrics in guidelines that can be completely redefined.

Refine for Quality Assessment offers several hundreds of pre-defined metrics covering domains such as:

From this desktop, it is possible to change or create a new set of quality charter by selecting the metrics or the measurement points defined in an ontology and to associate them with quality thresholds.

Summary of measurements

Aside from the detailed results produced by applying measurement quality charter Refine for Quality Assessment produces an overview of the results that is easy to use, in particular, in the context of the acceptance procedure for new maintenance releases.

• if the programme complies with the quality requirements, its status is green
• if it does not meet these requirements, its status is red

Diagnosis

Once measurement has been carried out, the natural next step is to go to the causes, i.e. making a detailed diagnosis before commissioning an effective improvement plan.

This desktop is used to restore the measurements obtained according to several lines such as organisation of code (programme, domain, application, legacy) or by measurement criteria (quality charter, measurement theme, metric)

Code Examination

It is often necessary to get to code level to examine lines of code impacted by the measurement quality charters.

Improvement Plan

As well as making observations and diagnoses, you need to act.
This is why this new desktop allows you to estimate the implementation effort of any improvement plan and therefore to optimise the cost of such a plan based on the objectives identified.