Summary of: “Measuring Software Design Quality" held on Friday, July 15, 2016 from 8:00-10:00 AM.
Many software issues and bugs are rooted in the design and architecture of the product. However, it is very hard to evaluate the quality of software design. Silverthread has developed a technique to objectively evaluate Software Design Quality.
The session was led by the founders of Silverthread. Silverthread has developed CodeMRI, a suite of tools that help organizations objectively visualize the Architecture and Design quality of software to understand the long-term maintainability of a system. The company has thousands of benchmarks and provides statistical projections to help estimate the future maintainability, agility, cost, and risk of working in a codebase base. Silverthread also has tools to help an organization determine whether a codebase should be left alone, refactored, or rewritten and to estimate the ROI of different scenarios.
Over the past 15 years, the founders researched the topic at Harvard Business School and MIT, creating measures of design quality using network analytic techniques, and measuring the impact of process agility on business and operational outcomes. Early research done by the team lays out methods for capturing and benchmarking design quality (modularity, hierarchy, layering, commonality, etc) in large and complex software codebases. The technology can be applied to analyze systems developed with a broad range of programming languages.
The discussion was led by Dr. Dan Sturtevant, Co-founder and CEO of Silverthread.