McCall’s Quality Factors

• Maintainability • Portability
• Flexibility • Reusability

Ad
n
• Testability • Interoperability

sio

ap
vi

tat
Re

io
n
Operation
• Correctness • Usability • Efficiency
• Reliability • Integrity
 Operation
• Correctness
– The extent to which a program satisfies its
specifications and fulfills the customer’s mission
objectives

• Reliability
– The extent to which a program can be expected to
perform its intended function with required precision.

• Efficiency
– The amount of computing resources required by a
program to perform its function
 Operation
• Integrity
– Extent to which access to software or data by
unauthorized persons can be controlled.

• Usability
– Effort required to learn, operate, prepare input,
and interpret output of a program
 Revision

• Maintainability
– Effort required to locate and fix an error in a
program

• Flexibility
– Effort required to modify an operational program

• Testability
– Effort required to test a program to ensure that it
performs its intended function
 Adaptation
• Portability
– Effort required to transfer the program from one
hardware and/or software system environment to
another

• Reusability
– Extent to which a program can be reused in other
applications

• Interoperability
– Effort required to couple one system to another
 Measuring Quality

• Correctness
• Maintainability
• Integrity
• Usability
 Measuring Correctness
Degree to which software performs its function
– Defects/FP or Defects/KLOC

• Defects verify lack of conformance to requirements

• These are problems reported by the user after
release
• Defects are counted over a standard period of time,
typically during the first year of operation
 Maintainability
• The ease with which a program can be corrected if
an error is encountered, adapted if environment
changes, enhanced if the customer requires an
enhancement in functionality

• Its an ‘indirect measure’

 Measuring Maintainability
• MMTC – mean time to change
– Time it takes to analyze the change request,
design an appropriate modification, implement the
change, test it, and implement it

• Spoilage – cost oriented metric

– The cost to correct defects encountered after the
software has been released to the users
 Integrity
• It is defined as software’s ability to withstand attack (both
accidental and intentional) to its security.
• Threat is the probability (derived or measured from empirica
evidence) that an attack of a specific type will occur within a
given time and security is the probability that an attack of a
specific type will be repelled.
• Integrity = ∑ [1-(threat x (1-security)]
• E.g if threat is 0.25 and security is 0.95, the integrity of the
system is 0.99.
 Measuring Usability
• Physical or intellectual skill required learn
the system
• The time required to become moderately
efficient in the use of system
• The net increase in productivity
• A subjective assessment
 Defect Removal Efficiency
• Defect removal efficiency provides benefits at both the project and
process level
• It is a measure of the filtering ability of QA activities as they are applied
throughout all process framework activities
– It indicates the percentage of software errors found before software release
• It is defined as DRE = E / (E + D)
– E is the number of errors found before delivery of the software to the end
user
– D is the number of defects found after delivery
• As D increases, DRE decreases (i.e., becomes a smaller and smaller
fraction)
• The ideal value of DRE is 1, which means no defects are found after
delivery
• DRE encourages a software team to institute techniques for finding as
many errors as possible before delivery

12