SAPHIRE 8 Quality Assurance Software Metrics Report

The purpose of this review of software metrics is to examine the quality of the metrics gathered in the 2010 IV&V and to set an outline for results of updated metrics runs to be performed. We find from the review that the maintenance of accepted quality standards presented in the SAPHIRE 8 initial Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) of April, 2010 is most easily achieved by continuing to utilize the tools used in that effort while adding a metric of bug tracking and resolution. Recommendations from the final IV&V were to continue periodic measurable metrics such as McCabe's complexity measure to ensure quality is maintained. The four software tools used to measure quality in the IV&V were CodeHealer, Coverage Validator, Memory Validator, Performance Validator, and Thread Validator. These are evaluated based on their capabilities. We attempted to run their latest revisions with the newer Delphi 2010 based SAPHIRE 8 code that has been developed and was successful with all of the Validator series of tools on small tests. Another recommendation from the IV&V was to incorporate a bug tracking and resolution metric. To improve our capability of producing this metric, we integrated our current web reporting system with the SpiraTest test management software purchased earlier this year to track requirements traceability.