A portfolio of internal quality metrics for software architects

Paper in proceeding, 2016

Maintaining high quality software in the age of interconnected systems, systems of systems and Internet of things requires efficient management of the evolution of the software. Evolving the architecture of the software together with the evolution of the design is one of the key areas in maintaining the high quality. In this paper we present the results of our studies at Software Center (nine companies and five universities) with the goal to identify the main information needs and quality metrics for the role of software architects. As a result of our studies we can describe the most commonly used metrics in software engineering in general and in software architecting in particular – e.g. architectural stability or component coupling. We present these metrics and their interpretation (what should be done and why based on the values of metrics). The theoretical framing for this chapter is the ISO/IEC 15939 standard -- Systems and Software Engineering, Measurement Processes.