Software Quality Grades for GIS Software

The data provides a summary of the state of development practice for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software (as of August 2017). The summary is based on grading a set of 30 GIS products using a template of 56 questions based on 13 software qualities. The products range in scope and purpose from a complete desktop GIS systems, to stand-alone tools, to programming libraries/packages. The template used to grade the software is found in the TabularSummaries.zip file. Each quality is measured with a series of questions. For unambiguity the responses are quantified wherever possible (e.g.~yes/no answers). The goal is for measures that are visible, measurable and feasible in a short time with limited domain knowledge. Unlike a comprehensive software review, this template does not grade on functionality and features. Therefore, it is possible that a relatively featureless product can outscore a feature-rich product. A virtual machine is used to provide an optimal testing environments for each software product. During the process of grading the 30 software products, it is much easier to create a new virtual machine to test the software on, rather than using the host operating system and file system. The raw data obtained by measuring each software product is in SoftwareGrading-GIS.xlsx. Each line in this file corresponds to between 2 and 4 hours of measurement time by a software engineer. The results are summarized for each quality in the TabularSummaries.zip file, as a tex file and compiled pdf file.

本数据集汇总了截至2017年8月的地理信息系统（Geographic Information Systems）软件的开发实践现状。该汇总基于一套围绕13项软件质量维度构建、包含56个问题的评分模板，对30款GIS产品开展评级。参评产品的覆盖范围与用途涵盖完整桌面GIS系统、独立工具乃至编程库/软件包。本次评分所用的模板可在TabularSummaries.zip文件中获取。每一项软件质量维度均通过一系列问题进行量化评估；为确保表述清晰无歧义，所有评测回复均尽可能采用量化形式（例如是/否类答案）。本次评测的目标是获取在有限领域知识背景下，可在短时间内完成的直观、可量化且切实可行的评测指标。与全面的软件评测不同，本评分模板并非依据功能特性进行评分，因此即便一款功能相对单薄的产品，也有可能获得高于功能丰富产品的评分。本次评测为每款软件产品搭建了最优测试环境——虚拟机（virtual machine）。在对30款软件产品进行评分的过程中，相较于直接使用宿主操作系统与文件系统，新建虚拟机运行待测试软件要简便得多。对每款软件产品的实测原始数据存储于SoftwareGrading-GIS.xlsx文件中，该文件中的每一行数据对应一名软件工程师2至4小时的评测耗时。各项质量维度的评测结果已汇总至TabularSummaries.zip文件中，包含TeX源文件与编译完成的PDF文件。