Concepts of operational software quality metrics

Managers and developers of large software systems need a set of operationally defined measures of software quality. This paper presents metrics that are useful for the estimation of an overall software quality and computation of estimated field values such as the field fault density. The newly-developed algorithms can be applied to estimate the quality of a software whose contents change throughout the period of testing. Moreover, the estimation algorithms characterize major and minor software releases separately. The accuracy and reliability of the estimation algorithms are discussed.