SOFTWARE SOURCE CODE: A QUALITY ASSURANCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

Today software systems play a critical role in various aspects of human life, from rockets to health care, and become part of everyday life. Many of these systems are relied upon as being essential for the completion of day-to-day activities. The increased reliance on computer applications, and organizations that produce software puts more and more strain on software developers to produce high quality systems. For these reasons many international standards, requirements, and constrains were established to assure quality of software. This paper introduces a new software Source Code Quality Assurance Measurement System named "SCQAM". In addition, it presents some of the most important software quality assurance fundamentals used during the different phases of software development life cycle. Particularly, the focus of this paper is bounded to the coding phase, where in this phase the cure of software system will be established. Therefore, the scope of this paper covers most of the related aspects of software quality assurance of the coding phase including: software metrics, software quality factors, and software quality models like McCall's model, Boehm's model, ISO 9126 model, and SATC NASA model. As a result of analyzing these models, the proposed "SCQAM" system was designed, developed, and tested. The proposed SCQAM can measure over 30-source code metrics, then group these metrics to compute nine distinct quality factors and indicators, then an overall quality indicator of the input source code is calculated. The experimental results show the superiority of the SCQAM system over Project Analyzer, another quality assurance measurement system, specifically in the area of source code quality measurement.