The McCabe Visual Quality Toolset

The Standard for Software Quality

The Software Quality Assurance (SQA) professional operates in the midst of many conflicting ambiguities and pressures. Many questions are often asked, such as: When is the quality right or when will it be right? How do you explain to questioning developers and managers the basics of good software? How do you establish an effective program that builds quality into the product?

Crucially, SQA centers on assessing software to establish whether or not it is worthy of release. To do this, objective standards of measurement, or metrics, must be established in the organization. They are used as the basis for judging quality and therefore, software's release.

McCabe and Associates has long been a leading company establishing standards for quality in software. Based on mathematically rigorous analysis of the structure of software, McCabe's incisive metrics quantify the complexity and structure of software. They have become the world's standard.

The McCabe Visual Quality ToolSet (VQT) computes the essential McCabe Metrics(TM) and presents them in a comprehensive, interactive visual environment. The VQT provides a powerful global view of software, regardless of size. SQA professionals can use this view to identify and concentrate on the areas needing close attention and where metrics do not meet the organization's quality standards. Further, the visualization provides the basis for communication between SQA and the developers. Both can see where the problems exist and the paths to improvement.

The McCabe VQT provides the environment for assessing quality. It provides the common tool for the SQA professional across any language the organization may choose. Available on most Unix(R) platforms, as well as for MS-Windows(TM) and NT(TM) platforms, the VQT is the standard for technical and commercial software environments. The McCabe VQT provides flexible and robust capabilities needed for assessing and improving software. It does this against a background of visualization, which provides the mutual understanding for continuous improvement to software teams.

A visual environment for understanding software

• Graphical displays show the code, the metrics, and pinpoint the potential problem areas
• Many display output formats provide multiple ways to analyze and view software

• Metrics that provide objective and proven measures of software reliability and maintainability
• Metrics that measure quality of software design and coding
• Metrics that drive testing and reengineering

• Complete availability of the well-known McCabe Metrics
• New metrics from McCabe and other sources frequently incorporated into the tools, avoiding obsolescence
• Halstead metrics provide alternate views of software complexity
• Click here for a complete list of metrics and their definitions

• Users can define, calculate, and display their own metrics
• Any metric can be correlated with any other metric or software experience data

• Provides a common environment for any language
• Is essential for understanding system migration and language conversion projects

• Supports Military Standard 2167A by interfacing with major desktop packages such as FrameMaker and Interleaf
• Generates report output in the above formats as well as in encapsulated PostScript, HPGL, and ASCII
• Generates a wide variety of information, both on the screen and in report format
• Provides graphic and textual reports on all supported metrics

The ``McCabe Quality Assurance Course'' represents an opportunity to learn from an acknowledged leader in the field of SQA. In an environment that fosters understanding through use of the code analysis and visualization capabilities of the McCabe VQT, students will learn the fundamentals of software complexity and how it affects software reliability and maintainability. Other highlights of the course include setting up a QA program, an analysis of various QA standards including those of the DoD and IEEE, and how to handle audits and reviews.

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