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Measuring Software Quality

By Cornelia Davis, Stephen Magill, Rosalind Radcliffe, James Wickett

A Guide to Employing Metrics in Software Development Processes

In today’s digital economy, where software is central to the business, the overall quality of that software is more important than ever before.

Together with a solid market need and business plan, top quality software leads to customer satisfaction, revenue, and profitability, and the best designs can even allow an organization to more easily enter new markets.

But even with the most solid business plan, poor quality software can be one of the fastest roads to failure.

In this 2020 Forum paper, we suggest that there are a set of measurable leading indicators to achieve desirable outcomes in software quality. We provide a framework to help create high-quality code and point our common measures that are misleading.

  • Publication Date 2020
  • Pages 14

Features

  • Metrics and Measurements

    This paper provides clear metrics and measurements for evaluating and ensuring quality software delivery.

  • Expert Authors

    This paper is written by experienced leaders across industries who have led large transformations in enterprises across industries.

  • Framework for Improvement

    This paper provides a six-element framework to help organizations easily apply and adapt metrics for their own unique needs.

  • All Levels

    Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. This paper directly provides guidance on how to lead change no matter your role or title.

About the Resource

In today’s digital economy, where software is central to the business, the overall quality of that software is more important than ever before.

Together with a solid market need and business plan, top quality software leads to customer satisfaction, revenue, and profitability, and the best designs can even allow an organization to more easily enter new markets.

But even with the most solid business plan, poor quality software can be one of the fastest roads to failure.

In this 2020 Forum paper, we suggest that there are a set of measurable leading indicators to achieve desirable outcomes in software quality. We provide a framework to help create high-quality code and point our common measures that are misleading.

Cornelia Davis
Stephen Magill
Rosalind Radcliffe
James Wickett
Cornelia Davis

Cornelia Davis

Cornelia Davis is a software technologist with more than thirty years experience who drives technical strategy, product development and go to market, and helps customers leverage said technology to further their business goals. Cornelia prefers to spend half her time directly engaged with customers, deeply understanding their needs and finding solutions to their problems. The other half of the time she spends distilling what she learns through these engagements and using that to drive product evolution as well as industry advancement through evangelism—conferences and writing. Her personal mantra is “free your mind.” She is also the author of Cloud Native: Designing Change- Tolerant Software. And she still cuts code, even if only a bit of the time.

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Stephen Magill

Stephen Magill

Vice President, Product Innovation at Sonatype

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Rosalind Radcliffe

Rosalind Radcliffe

IBM Fellow, CIO DevSecOps CTO

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James Wickett

James Wickett

Head of Research at Verica & Author on DevOps and DevSecOps at LinkedIn Learning

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