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.