Benchmarking-oriented Analysis of Source Code Quality - Experiences with the QBench Approach

Static code analysis tools provide valuable input for experts to judge the internal quality of software. Nevertheless this approach is time consuming and therefore (semi-)automatic approaches would be desirable. In the QBench [14] project a promising benchmarking oriented approach for calculating a quality rating was developed. We tried to apply the methods and tools of the QBench project in order to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. In summary, the calculation of the quality rating does not lead to satisfying results. We therefore developed a number of alternative calculation methods and compared them to the results of the original calculation. Some of these calculation variants lead to a better characterization of the software quality as the original QBench algorithm. Furthermore we detected some technical weaknesses in the provided toolset and considerably enhanced this toolset for calculating the quality rating to make it better applicable.