<P> Many of the existing software measures count structural elements of the application that result from parsing the source code for such individual instructions (Park, 1992), tokens (Halstead, 1977), control structures (McCabe, 1976), and objects (Chidamber & Kemerer, 1994). </P> <P> Software quality measurement is about quantifying to what extent a system or software rates along these dimensions . The analysis can be performed using a qualitative or quantitative approach or a mix of both to provide an aggregate view (using for example weighted average (s) that reflect relative importance between the factors being measured). </P> <P> This view of software quality on a linear continuum has to be supplemented by the identification of discrete Critical Programming Errors . These vulnerabilities may not fail a test case, but they are the result of bad practices that under specific circumstances can lead to catastrophic outages, performance degradations, security breaches, corrupted data, and myriad other problems (Nygard, 2007) that make a given system de facto unsuitable for use regardless of its rating based on aggregated measurements . A well - known example of vulnerability is the Common Weakness Enumeration, a repository of vulnerabilities in the source code that make applications exposed to security breaches . </P> <P> The measurement of critical application characteristics involves measuring structural attributes of the application's architecture, coding, and in - line documentation, as displayed in the picture above . Thus, each characteristic is affected by attributes at numerous levels of abstraction in the application and all of which must be included calculating the characteristic's measure if it is to be a valuable predictor of quality outcomes that affect the business . The layered approach to calculating characteristic measures displayed in the figure above was first proposed by Boehm and his colleagues at TRW (Boehm, 1978) and is the approach taken in the ISO 9126 and 25000 series standards . These attributes can be measured from the parsed results of a static analysis of the application source code . Even dynamic characteristics of applications such as reliability and performance efficiency have their causal roots in the static structure of the application . </P>

What do you consider characteristics of quality code