CQE: an approach to automatically estimate the code quality using an objective metric from an empirical study

Bugs in a project, at any stage of Software life cycle development are costly and difficult to find and fix. Moreover, the later a bug is found, the more expensive it is to fix. There are static analysis tools to ease the process of finding bugs, but their results are not easy to filter out critical errors and is time consuming to analyze. To solve this problem we used two steps: first to enhance the bugs severity and second is to estimate the code quality, byWeighted Error Code Density metric. Our experiment on 10 widely used open-source Java applications automatically shows their code quality estimated using our objective metric. We also enhance the error ranking of FindBugs, and provide a clear view on the critical errors to fix as well as low priority ones to potentially ignore.