Exploring the relationships between design measures and software quality in object-oriented systems

The first goal of this paper is to empirically explore the relationships between existing object-oriented coupling, cohesion, and inheritance measures and the probability of fault detection in system classes during testing. In other words, we wish to better understand the relationship between existing design measurement in OO systems and the quality of the software developed. The second goal is to propose an investigation and analysis strategy to make these kind of studies more repeatable and comparable, a problem which is pervasive in the literature on quality measurement. Results show that many of the measures capture similar dimensions in the data set, thus reflecting the fact that many of them are based on similar principles and hypotheses. However, it is shown that by using a subset of measures, accurate models can be built to predict which classes contain most of the existing faults. When predicting fault-prone classes, the best model shows a percentage of correct classification...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: JSS
• Authors: Lionel C. Briand, Jürgen Wüst, John W. Daly, D. Victor Porter
• Keywords: Better Understand, Fault Detection, Inheritance Measures, JSS 2000