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\begin{document}

\title{Statistical measurement of software quality}
\thanks{The research was supported by the (Hungarian) National Office for Research and Technology (NKTH) under grant Nr. GVOP-3.2.2-2004-07-0021/3.0.}
\author{M\'aty\'as Arat\'o\AND G\'abor Fazekas\AND Lajos Koll\'ar}
\institute{Department of Information Technology\\Faculty of Informatics\\University of Debrecen\\ e-mail: \{arato,fazekasg,kollarl\}@inf.unideb.hu}
\address{\textbf{M\'aty\'as Arat\'o, G\'abor Fazekas, Lajos Koll\'ar}\\ H--4032 Debrecen, Egyetem t\'er 1.}

\begin{ICAIpaper}
\begin{abstract}
When talking about software quality, it is almost impossible to give objective answers to questions like `What constitutes the quality?', `What property of the system should be measured in order to determine its quality?' or even `Does a given product (i.e., any deliverable artifact, such as COTS product, source code, user manual, test plan, etc.) have a better overall quality than another one?'. But some other questions, like `Is this algorithm faster than another one?' or `Does the current version of a product have a better overall quality than its previous one?', can be answered. The main reason behind it is that no general definition can be given for the quality of a standalone software product so there is no universal method to map each individual product to a single number for comparing different products. When we either tailor our needs to particular aspects for the comparision (e.g., runtime) or try to compare an apple to an apple (instead of a pear), i.e., different versions or releases of the same (or similar) product (which means that we should only focus on some---but the same!---properties), our work becomes easier.

In our viewpoint, quality measurement of products should not only be done for a whole system in its entirety but should span the entire development process instead, resulting in a load of measured data. We propose a statistical model based on stochastic processes which can be used for revealing possible errors during the development process and hereby improve the quality, and we discuss the differences and similarities between time-dependent and time-independent development processes.
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\end{abstract}

\end{ICAIpaper}
\end{document}
