Continuous Software Quality Supervision Using SourceInventory and Columbus

Several tools and methods for source code quality assurance based on static analysis finally reached a state when they are applicable in practice and recognized by the industry. However, most of these tools are used in an isolated manner and very rarely as organic parts of the quality assurance process.
Furthermore, little or no help is provided in interpreting the outputs of these tools. This paper presents SourceInventory, a system for source code-based software quality assessment and monitoring, which is able to collect, store and present measurement data including metrics, coding problems and other kinds of data like bug numbers and test coverage information. It helps software developers, architects and managers to take control over their software's quality by performing continuous code scans, fault detection, coding style verification, architecture violation detection, and automatic report generation considering metric baselines.

Keywords: Software quality assessment, static verification, continuous measurement, software metrics, bug detection.