TY - GEN
T1 - A probabilstic mathematical model to measure software regularity
AU - Ghazarian, Arbi
PY - 2011/12/1
Y1 - 2011/12/1
N2 - Software developers, either in a planned or ad hod fashion, introduce regularities such as architectural, design or programming conventions, idioms, and patterns into software systems while developing source code. There are numerous unverfied claims in the software engineering literature about the impacts of such regularities on software quality. To investigate how the degree of conformance to regularities in a software component affects its various quality attributes necessarily requires a measure of software regularity. Unfortunately, an extensive search failed to find a measure of regularity, or design consistency, in the software engineering literature. In this paper, we propose a model to measure a component's Degree of Regularity (DR), as well as its Regularity Density (RD). We evaluate the validity of the proposed metrics in a case study of regularity and defect-based quality attributes on three major components of an industrial large-scale software system. Results from this empirical study suggest that a component's defect-based measures tend to decrease as its regularity-based measures increase. This finding has the potential implication of increasing the reliability of software systems by minimizing the defect rates of software components through controlling their regularity.
AB - Software developers, either in a planned or ad hod fashion, introduce regularities such as architectural, design or programming conventions, idioms, and patterns into software systems while developing source code. There are numerous unverfied claims in the software engineering literature about the impacts of such regularities on software quality. To investigate how the degree of conformance to regularities in a software component affects its various quality attributes necessarily requires a measure of software regularity. Unfortunately, an extensive search failed to find a measure of regularity, or design consistency, in the software engineering literature. In this paper, we propose a model to measure a component's Degree of Regularity (DR), as well as its Regularity Density (RD). We evaluate the validity of the proposed metrics in a case study of regularity and defect-based quality attributes on three major components of an industrial large-scale software system. Results from this empirical study suggest that a component's defect-based measures tend to decrease as its regularity-based measures increase. This finding has the potential implication of increasing the reliability of software systems by minimizing the defect rates of software components through controlling their regularity.
KW - Defect density
KW - Degree of regularity
KW - Empirical study
KW - Regularity density
KW - Source-code regularity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84862291460&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.2316/P.2011.758-006
DO - 10.2316/P.2011.758-006
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84862291460
SN - 9780889869066
T3 - Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011
SP - 192
EP - 199
BT - Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011
T2 - 15th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011
Y2 - 14 December 2011 through 16 December 2011
ER -