Subjective Software Measurement Tools for the Human Assessor

Software Engineering is a discipline in crisis, where late, over-budget and, most alarmingly , poor quality software is the daily reality. Software Measurement, the application of measurement principles to software products and processes, is becoming recognised as a potential solution to these problems. Of particular importance to the software community is the need to deene the characteristics of software which govern its quality, and to develop tools and techniques for measuring that quality. Various approaches to achieve this have been proposed, most of which are based on the application of objective metrics to source code. A diierent approach has been developed by the ESPRIT project SCOPE which aims to integrate the software expert into the assessment activity. This paper describes an extension to this idea which provides software tools to automate those parts of the assessment which are purely objective. We see that partial automation of the assessment makes the task of the human assessor simpler, more pleasant and less error-prone.