Quality assessment framework to rank software projects

Over the last three decades, many quality models have been proposed for software systems. These models employ software metrics to assess different quality attributes. However, without adequate thresholds, it is very hard to associate plausible interpretations with software quality attributes. Many attempts are reported in the literature to identify meaningful thresholds for software metrics. However, these attempts fail to clearly map the proposed thresholds to the assessment of software quality attributes. This paper aims at bridging this gap and provides a methodology for quality assessment models based on software metric thresholds. By doing so, software products can be easily ranked according to specific quality levels. Our methodology defines software metric thresholds to generate ordinal data. Then, the ordinal data is combined with a weighting scheme based on the Pearson correlation coefficient. The resulting weights are assigned to data categories in each software metric. Thanks to these weights, project quality levels are straightforwardly estimated. To assess the effectiveness of our software metric thresholding framework, we carry out an empirical study. The reported results clearly show that the proposed framework has a significant impact on the assessment and evaluation of the software product quality.