A software quality metric is a quantitative measure or benchmark for assessing characteristics such as performance, reliability, maintainability, and overall system quality. It gives development, testing, debugging, maintenance, and improvement work an empirical basis. section 6.2
Quality metrics are commonly grouped by what they measure and when they are applied:
- Product metrics assess the software product itself. section 6.2
- Process metrics assess development and related engineering processes. section 6.2
- Project metrics assess the project context. section 6.2
- Static metrics examine software without running it, while dynamic metrics assess behavior during execution. section 6.2
Code maintainability measures
For the Department-StatisticsVisitor class, cyclomatic complexity is 1, Halstead complexity is 2, Halstead difficulty is 1, and maintainability index is 100. These values are treated as favorable because lower complexity and difficulty, and higher maintainability, indicate easier comprehension or maintenance.
