A measure to assess the behavior of method stereotypes in object-oriented software

The implementation of software systems should ideally follow the design intentions of the system. However, this is not always the case - the design and implementation of software systems may diverge during software evolution. In this paper we propose a measure based on run time information to assess the consistency between the design and the implementation of OO methods. The measure is based on the analysis of the runtime behavior of methods and considers the frequency of fan-in and fan-out method calls. We analyze this measure with respect to the design intent of methods, reflected by their stereotype. We apply the proposed approach to data from three open source software systems and analyze the behavior of method stereotypes across the systems and within each system. The analysis shows that most methods behave as expected based on their stereotypes and it also detects cases that may need re-engineering attention.