The Use of Application Scanners in Software Product Quality Assessment
This work addresses the need for automated quality control in software development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods by integrating scanners.
The paper tackled the problem of automating software quality assessments by integrating application scanners into a general quality assessment method based on explicit quality models and Bayesian nets, and it investigated the applicability and detection capabilities of common scanners in a case study with two open-source web shops.
Software development needs continuous quality control for a timely detection and removal of quality problems. This includes frequent quality assessments, which need to be automated as far as possible to be feasible. One way of automation in assessing the security of software are application scanners that test an executing software for vulnerabilities. At present, common quality assessments do not integrate such scanners for giving an overall quality statement. This paper presents an integration of application scanners into a general quality assessment method based on explicit quality models and Bayesian nets. Its applicability and the detection capabilities of common scanners are investigated in a case study with two open-source web shops.