An Efficient Measurement of Object Oriented Design Vulnerability

As foundation is to building, design phase is to software because in this phase ideas start converting into actuality. Effects of vulnerabilities introduced in this phase manifest with ongoing software life cycle. Even detection and correction of these vulnerabilities seem to be difficult in absence of any efficient method or automated tool. This paper suggests an approach to identify vulnerable classes in object oriented design. The method proposed also investigates whether transitive nature of inheritance contributes to propagation of vulnerabilities from one class to another or not. An algorithm for computing vulnerability propagation factor (VPF) has been developed, which measures number of vulnerable classes because of the vulnerability in some classes of an object oriented design.