On the Validity of the IT-CISQ Quality Model for Automatic Measurement of Maintainability

IT-CISQ (Consortium for IT Software Quality) standard that was initiated and is driven by an OMG (Object Management Group) consortium claims to provide operational measures for a number of quality criteria of the ISO / IEC 25010 quality standard. In order to show the applicability of the IT-CISQ standard, we built a tool that provides automatic measures for the maintainability related measures of the IT-CISQ standard. We evaluated five Java open source projects with our IT-CISQ quality model and compared these results with the result of an expert-centered evaluation of the maintainability of these projects. The study shows that the IT-CISQ quality model for maintainability is well suited as a predictor for the quality criterion maintainability. Compared to our more comprehensive EMISQ (Expert Centered Method for Internal Software Quality) quality model (165 EMISQ measures vs. 18 IT-CISQ measures), the IT-CISQ quality model yields a similar order of projects. However, it is of course less suitable to give good guidance about improving aspects, as our more comprehensive EMISQ quality model includes considerably more maintainability related aspects of software. Furthermore, the tooling provided by us is innovative and could directly be used in practice by itself.