Indicators of Structural Stability of Object-Oriented Designs: A Case Study

Author

Elish, Mahmoud O. ; Rine, David

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., George Mason Univ., Fairfax, VA

fYear

2005

fDate

7-7 April 2005

Firstpage

183

Lastpage

192

Abstract

The structural stability of an object-oriented design (OOD) refers to the extent to which the structure of the design is preserved throughout the evolution of the software from one release to the next. This paper empirically investigates potential indicators of measures of structural stability of OODs. Both product-related and process-related indicators are considered. These indicators were evaluated through a case study that involves 13 successive releases of Apache Ant. The results showed that each one of the stability metrics is significantly correlated with at least one of the investigated indicators. To make early predictions of the values of each one of the stability metrics, statistically significant regression models were constructed from subsets of the investigated indicators

Keywords

object-oriented programming; regression analysis; software metrics; software prototyping; Apache Ant; object-oriented design; process-related indicator; product-related indicator; regression model; software evolution; software metrics; structural stability; Computer aided software engineering; Computer science; Object oriented modeling; Predictive models; Size measurement; Software design; Software measurement; Software systems; Stability; Structural engineering;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Engineering Workshop, 2005. 29th Annual IEEE/NASA

Conference_Location

Greenbelt, MD

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2306-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SEW.2005.28

Filename

1521206