Tool Support for Expert-Centred Code Assessments

There is empirical evidence that the code quality of software has an important impact on the external, i.e., user perceptible, software quality. Currently a large number of source code metrics exist that seem to ease the evaluation of code quality. Nevertheless, studies show that the theoretical foundations are weak and promising approaches for the automatic assessment of code quality are to be considered with great caution. We therefore came to the conclusion that the metric values and other findings provided by various static code analysis tools can only be used in the context of an expert-centred assessment of internal software quality. In order to be able to carry out code quality assessments in a timely and efficient manner it is inevitable to have additional tool support. For that purpose we developed the eclipsed based tool software product quality reporter (SPQR) that supports expert-centred evaluation of source code - from the formulation of project-specific quality models up to the generation of preliminary code quality reports. The application of SPQR already proved its usefulness in various code assessment projects around the world.