An Empirical Study on the Relation between Dependency Neighborhoods and Failures

—Changing source code in large software systems is complex and requires a good understanding of dependencies between software components. Modification to components with little regard to dependencies may have an adverse impact on the quality of the latter, i.e., increase their risk to fail. We conduct an empirical study to understand the relationship between the quality of components and the characteristics of their dependencies such as their frequency of change, their complexity, number of past failures and the like. Our study has been conducted on two large software systems: Microsoft VISTA and ECLIPSE. Our results show that components that have outgoing dependencies to components with higher object-oriented complexity tend to have fewer field failures for VISTA, but the opposite relation holds for ECLIPSE. Likewise, other notable observations have been made through our study that (a) confirm that certain characteristics of components increase the risk of their dependencies to f...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICST
• Authors: Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, Kim Herzig, Rahul Premraj, Laurie Williams
• Keywords: Empirical, Fewer field Failures, ICST 2011, Large Software Systems, Software Engineering