A group process for defining local software quality: Field applications and validation experiments
Carmen J. Trammell, Jesse H. Poore · Software Practice and Experience · 1992
Abstract ‘Global’ measures of software quality are generally not used by practitioners because they have not been calibrated for local operating environments. A participative process for defining local software quality has been defined, applied in the field, and evaluated in formal validation experiments. In four field applications of the process, a ‘jury’ of seasoned practitioners ranked a sample of modules from the organization's inventory of code and produced a ‘software quality rule set’. The results of each field application were tested in a formal validation experiment to determine whether the obtained rule set was a valid representation of the organization's sense of quality, i.e. whether the locally‐derived rules could enable non‐organizational programmers to make judgments about quality that were similar to those of the jury. In each experiment, non‐organizational programmers ranked the same set of modules that were ranked by the organization's jury, using either the locally‐derived rules, generic (textbook) rules, placebo (non‐helpful) rules, or no rules. The correlation between the judgments of non‐organizational programmers using local rules and the jury was statistically significant at p < 0–005; all other correlations were significant at p < 0–005. The results support a conclusion that the group process for defining local software quality is reliable in producing valid rule sets.