A Review on Role of Software Metrics in Software Quality

Software metrics provides a quantitative basis for planning and predicting software development processes. The quality of the software can be controlled and improved easily. Quality in fact aids higher productivity, which has brought software metrics to the forefront. Many metrics and models have been develop to promote and utilized resulting in remarkable successes. It examines the area of software engineering to see why software metrics are needed and also reviews their contribution to software quality and reliability. Results can be improved further as we acquire additional experience with variety of software metrics. Size measures include source lines-of-code, function points, and feature points. Complexity is a function of size which impacts design errors and latent defects, ultimately resulting in quality problems, cost overruns, and schedule slips. Complexity must be continuously measured, tracked, and controlled. Software metrics measure different aspects of software complexity and therefore play an important role in analyzing and improving software quality. It has indicated that they provide useful information on external quality aspects of software such as its maintainability, reusability and reliability. Software metrics provide a mean of estimating the efforts needed for testing. Software metrics are often categorized into products and process metrics.