Monitor Trends in Quality Against a Baseline
The standards developed by CISQ for software size and code quality provide a common basis for benchmarking software quality across systems, technologies, vendors and companies. The metrics are used to develop baselines and thresholds that are specific to technology, industry vertical, application type, and other demographic characteristics.
The CISQ quality measures for Security, Reliability, Maintainability and Performance Efficiency are displayed in a benchmark report as density metrics. The density metric is comprised of violations per Function Point or violations per 1,000 Lines of Code (KLOC). Software quality may also be reported in Sigma levels for the analysis of large systems. Sigma levels are determined by the number of times a software flaw is introduced out of the number of opportunities to introduce such a flaw – for example, the number of empty catch blocks out of all the catch blocks in the program.
Benchmark Example
| Quality characteristic | Your application | Peer group average | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 4.46σ | 4.83σ | -7.7% |
| Security | 4.65σ | 4.56σ | 1.97% |
| Performance Efficiency | 3.98σ | 4.23σ | -5.9% |
| Maintainability | 4.89σ | 4.78σ | 2.3% |