Pragmatic design quality assessment

Summary form only given. Assessing and improving quality is paramount in every engineering discipline. Software engineering, however, is not considered a classical engineering activity for several reasons, such as intrinsic complexity and lack of rigor. In general, if a software system is delivering the expected functionality, only in few cases people see the need to analyze the internals. This tutorial is aimed to offer a pragmatic approach to analyzing the quality of software systems. On the one hand, it will offer a brief theoretical background on detecting quality problems by using and combining metrics, and by providing visual evidence of the state of affairs in the system. On the other hand, as analyzing real systems requires adequate tool support, the tutorial will offer an overview of the problems that occur in using such tools and provide a practical demonstration of using state-of-the-art tools on a real case study.