Software quality measurement based on error propagation analysis in software networks

Based on the analysis of error propagation in software networks,a novel method was presented for quantifying the quality of software.Firstly,software systems were modeled as software networks(i.e.,method calling network) with nodes representing the methods and directed edges representing the calling relationships between methods.And then errors were injected into software networks randomly or under control to study propagation dynamics of errors and proposed a new metric(SQC) to measure the quality of software.Empirical results on several real software systems show that SQC can be effectively used to measure software quality,and it has a negative correlation with other software networks metrics such as number of edges and structural entropy.All these results have many implications on the high quality software development.