A probabilstic mathematical model to measure software regularity

Arbi Ghazarian

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011
Pages192-199
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2011
Event15th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011 - Dallas, TX, United States
Duration: Dec 14 2011Dec 16 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011

Other

Other15th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, SEA 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDallas, TX
Period12/14/1112/16/11

Keywords

  • Defect density
  • Degree of regularity
  • Empirical study
  • Regularity density
  • Source-code regularity

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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