Defining and Validating High-Level Design Metrics

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Date
1998-10-15Author
Briand, Lionel
Morasca, Sandro
Basili, Victor R.
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Show full item recordAbstract
The availability of significant metrics in the early phases of the software
development process allows for a better management of the later phases, and
a more effective quality assessment when software quality can still be
easily affected by preventive or corrective actions. In this paper, we
introduce and compare four strategies for defining high-level design
metrics. They are based on different sets of assumptions (about the design
process) related to a well defined experimental goal they help reach:
identify error-prone software parts. In particular, we define ratio-scale
metrics for cohesion and coupling that show interesting properties. An
in-depth experimental validation, conducted on large scale projects
demonstrates the usefulness of the metrics we define.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-75)