Assessing the impact of measurement tools on software mantainability evaluation

A relevant aspect of development and maintenance tasks is the evaluation of the software system quality. Measurement tools facilitate the measurement of software metrics and application of the quality models. However, differences and commonalities exist among the evaluation results obtained by the adoption of different measurement tools. This does not allow an objective and unambiguous evaluation of a software product quality level. In this direction, this paper proposes a preliminary investigation on the impact of measurement tools on the evaluation of the software maintainability metrics. Specifically, metrics values have been computed by using different software analysis tools for three software systems of different size. Measurements show that the considered measurement tools provide different values of metrics evaluated for the same software system.