Tool Support for Continuous Quality Control
This work targets software developers and organizations to prevent rising maintenance costs through automated quality assessments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tool concepts.
The paper addresses the problem of software quality decay by advocating for continuous quality control to identify issues early and reduce costs, and presents an overview of tools including their own open-source toolkit for creating dashboards.
Over time, software systems suffer gradual quality decay and therefore costs can rise if organizations fail to take proactive countermeasures. Quality control is the first step to avoiding this cost trap. Continuous quality assessments help users identify quality problems early, when their removal is still inexpensive; they also aid decision making by providing an integrated view of a software system's current status. As a side effect, continuous and timely feedback helps developers and maintenance personnel improve their skills and thereby decreases the likelihood of future quality defects. To make regular quality control feasible, it must be highly automated, and assessment results must be presented in an aggregated manner to avoid overwhelming users with data. This article offers an overview of tools that aim to address these issues. The authors also discuss their own flexible, open-source toolkit, which supports the creation of dashboards for quality control.