Abstract
Measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality software, and it is widely recognised that quality assurance of software products must be assessed focusing on early artifacts, such as class diagrams. After having thoroughly reviewed existing OO measures applicable to class diagrams at a high-level design stage, a set of metrics for the structural complexity of class diagrams obtained using Unified Modeling Language (UML) was defined. This paper describes a controlled experiment carried out in order to corroborate whether the metrics are closely related to UML class diagram modifiability. Based on data collected in the experiment, a prediction model for class diagram modifiability using a method for induction of fuzzy rules was built. The results of this experiment indicate that the metrics related to aggregation and generalization relationships are the determinant of class diagram modifiability. These findings are in the line with the conclusions drawn from two other similar controlled experiments.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Basili V. and Rombach H. The TAME project: towards improvement-oriented software environments, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 14(6) (1988) 728–738
Basili V. and Weiss D. A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data., IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 10 (1984) 728–738
Basili V., Shull F. and Lanubile F. Building Knowledge through Families of Experiments. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 25(4) (1999) 435–437
Briand L., Arisholm S., Counsell F., Houdek F. and Thévenod-Fosse P. Empirical Studies of Object-Oriented Artefacts, Methods, and Processes: State of the Art and Future Directions. Empirical Software Engineering, 4(4) (1999) 387–404
Briand L., Bunse C. and Daly J. A Controlled Experiment for evaluating Quality Guidelines on the Maintainability of Object-Oriented Designs. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 27(6) (2001) 513–530
Briand L., Morasca S. and Basili V. Property-Based Software Engineering Measurement. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 22(1) (1996) 68–86
Brito e Abreu F., Zuse H., Sahraoui H. and Melo W. Quantitative Approaches in Object-Oriented Software Engineering. Object-Oriented technology: ECOOP’99 Workshop Reader, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1743, Springer-Verlag, (1999) 326–337
Brito e Abreu F., Poels G., Sahraoui H. and Zuse H. Quantitative Approaches in Object-Oriented Software Engineering. Object-Oriented technology: ECOOP’00 Workshop Reader, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1964, Springer-Verlag, (2000) 93–103
Brito e Abreu F., Henderson-Sellers B., Piattini M., Poels G. and Sahraoui H. Quantitative Approaches in Object-Oriented Software Engineering. Object-Oriented technology: ECOOP’01 Workshop Reader, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, (2001) (to appear)
Brito e Abreu, F. and Carapaçua, R. Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Measuring and controlling the development process. 4th Int Conference on Software Quality, Mc Lean, Va, USA, (1994)
Brooks A., Daly J., Miller J., Roper M., Wood M. Replication of experimental results in software engineering. Technical report ISERN-96-10, International Software Engineering Research Network, (1996)
Chidamber, S. and Kemerer, C. A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 20(6) (1994) 476–493
Delgado, M., Gómez Skarmeta, A. and Jiménez, L. (2001). International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 16 (2001) 169–190
Fenton, N. and Pfleeger, S. Software Metrics: A Rigorous Approach. 2nd. edition. London, Chapman & Hall, (1997)
Genero M. Defining and Validating Metrics for Conceptual Models, Ph.D. thesis, University of Castilla-La Mancha, (2002)
Genero M., Jiménez, L. and Piattini M. Empirical Validation of Class Diagram Complexity Metrics. SCCC 2001, November, Chile, IEEE Computer Society Press, (2001) 95–104
Genero, M., Jiménez, L., Piattini, M. A prediction model for OO information system quality based on early indicators. ADBIS 2001, Vilnius, Lithuania, (2001) 211–224
Genero, M., Piattini, M. and Calero, C. Early Measures For UML class diagrams. L’Objet. 6(4), Hermes Science Publications, (2000) 489–515
Henderson-Sellers, B. Object-Oriented Metrics-Measures of complexity. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, (1996)
Kitchenham, B., Pflegger, S. and Fenton, N. Towards a Framework for Software Measurement Validation. IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, 21(12) (1995) 929–943
Linares, L. J., Delgado, M. and Skarmeta, A. Regression by fuzzy knowledge bases. Proceedings of the 4thEuropean Congress on Intelligent Techniques and Soft Computing. Aachen, Germany, September, (1996) 1170–1176
Lorenz, M. and Kidd, J. Object-Oriented Software Metrics: A Practical Guide. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, (1994)
Marchesi, M. OOA Metrics for the Unified Modeling Language. Proceedings of the 2d Euromicro Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, (1998) 67–73
Melton, A. (ed.). Software Measurement. London, International Thomson Computer Press, (1996)
Perry, D., Porter, A. and Votta, L. Empirical Studies on Software Engineering: A Roadmap. Future of Software Engineering. Ed:Anthony Finkelstein, ACM, (2000) 345–355
Poels G. and Dedene G. Evaluating the Effect of Inheritance on the Modifiability of Object-Oriented Business Domain Models. 5th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2001), Lisbon, Portugal, (2001)
Poels G. and Dedene G. Distance-based software measurement: necessary and sufficient properties for software measures, Information and Software Technology, 42(1) (2000) 35–46
Poels, G. and Dedene, G. Measures for Assessing Dynamic Complexity Aspects of Object-Oriented Conceptual Schemes. 19th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2000), Salt Lake City, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1920, Springer-Verlag, (2000) 499–512
Schneidewind, N. Body of Knowledge for Software Quality Measurement. IEEE Computer, 35(2) (2002) 77–83
Schneidewind, N. Methodology For Validating Software Metrics. IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, 18(5) (1992) 410–422
Sugeno, M. An Introductory Survey of Fuzzy Control. Information Sciences, 36 (1985) 59–83
Wohlin C., Runeson P., Höst M., Ohlson M., Regnell B. and Wesslén A. Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction, Kluwer Academic Publishers (2000)
Yacoub, S., Ammar, H., Robinson, T.. Dynamic Metrics for Object Oriented Designs Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Software Metrics (1998)
Zadeh, L. Fuzzy sets. Information and control, (1965), 338–353
Zadeh, L. The Concept of Linguistic Variable and its Applications to Approximate Reasoning Part I. Information Sciences, 8 (1973) 199–249
Zuse, H. A Framework of Software Measurement. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Genero, M., Jiménez, L., Piattini, M. (2002). A Controlled Experiment for Validating Class Diagram Structural Complexity Metrics. In: Bellahsène, Z., Patel, D., Rolland, C. (eds) Object-Oriented Information Systems. OOIS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2425. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46102-7_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46102-7_40
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44087-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46102-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive