Discrimination of software quality in a biomedical data analysis system

Object-oriented visualization-based software systems for biomedical data analysis must deal with complex and voluminous datasets within a flexible yet intuitive graphical user interface. In a research environment, the development of such systems are difficult to manage due to rapidly changing requirements, incorporation of newly developed algorithms, and the needs imposed by a diverse user base. One issue that research supervisors must contend with is an assessment of the quality of the system's software objects with respect to their extensibility, reusability, clarity, and efficiency. Objects from a biomedical data analysis system were independently analyzed by two software architects and ranked according to their quality. Quantitative software features were also compiled at varying levels of granularity. The discriminatory power of these software metrics is discussed and their effectiveness in assessing and predicting software object quality is described.

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