An evaluation of the internal quality of business applications: does size matter?

This study summarizes results of a study of the internal, structural quality of 288 business applications comprising 108 million lines of code collected from 75 companies in 8 industry segments. These applications were submitted to a static analysis that evaluates quality within and across application components that may be coded in different languages. The analysis consists of evaluating the application against a repository of over 900 rules of good architectural and coding practice. Results are presented for measures of security, performance, and changeability. The effect of size on quality is evaluated, and the ability of modularity to reduce the impact of size is suggested by the results.