Measure extendibility/extensibility quality attribute using object oriented design metric

Software design is one of the very important phases of the software engineering. The costs of software can be minimized if improvements or corrections made during this stage. Several of the current computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools like enterprise architect (EA) v12 do not have the capability to improve the design. This work aims to develop an algorithm that helps the software engineers evaluating the design quality utilizing one of the object-oriented (OO) design models namely quality metrics for object-oriented design (QMOOD) which represents as hierarchical model that describes the relationship between quality attributes such as reusability, extendibility and properties of the design of OO design. This algorithm describesed how the assessment of the extendibility/ extensibility using the software metrics has been done and the impact of the involved metrics in the extendibility value. Results obtained demonstrate the effect of OO design metrics such as inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction and coupling in quality characteristics like extensibility. The results show that lower values of abstraction and coupling, obtain higher value of extendibility which means the class diagram is ready to accept additional improvements. The proposed algorithm has been tested on two different systems (test cases) that vary in their class diagrams, functionalities, and complexities

Software design metrics for predicting maintainability of service-oriented software

As the pace of business change increases, service-oriented (SO) solutions should facilitate easier maintainability as underlying business logic and rules change. To date, little effort has been dedicated to considering how the structural properties of coupling and cohesion may impact on the maintainability of SO software products. Moreover, due to the unique design characteristics of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC), existing Procedural and Object-Oriented (OO) software metrics are not sufficient for the accurate measurement of service-oriented design structures. This thesis makes a contribution to the field of SOC, and Software Engineering in general, by proposing and evaluating a suite of design-level coupling and cohesion metrics for predicting the maintainability of service-oriented software products early in the Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC). The proposed metrics can provide the following benefits: i) facilitate design decisions that could lead to the specification of quality SO designs that can be maintained more easily; ii) identify design problems that can potentially have a negative effect on the maintainability of existing service-oriented design structures; and iii) support more effective control of maintainability in the earlier stages of SDLC. More specifically, the following research was conducted as part of this thesis: - A formal mathematical model covering the structural and behavioural properties of service-oriented system design was specified. - Software metrics were defined in a precise, unambiguous, and formal manner using the above model. - The metrics were theoretically validated and empirically evaluated in order to determine the success of this thesis as follows: a. Theoretical validation was based on the property-based software engineering measurement framework. All the proposed metrics were deemed as theoretically valid. b. Empirical evaluation employed a controlled experimental study involving ten participants who performed a range of maintenance tasks on two SO systems developed (and measured using the proposed metrics) specifically for this study. The majority of the experimental outcomes compared favourably with our expectations and hypotheses. More specifically, the results indicated that most of the proposed metrics can be used to predict the maintainability of service-oriented software products early in the SDLC, thereby providing evidence for the validity and potential usefulness of the derived metrics. Nevertheless, a broader range of industrial scale experiments and analyses are required to fully demonstrate the practical applicability of the metrics. This has been left to future work

A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems

In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment. Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition, self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen

Organizing the Technical Debt Landscape

To date, several methods and tools for detecting source code and design anomalies have been developed. While each method focuses on identifying certain classes of source code anomalies that potentially relate to technical debt (TD), the overlaps and gaps among these classes and TD have not been rigorously demonstrated. We propose to construct a seminal technical debt landscape as a way to visualize and organize research on the subjec

Estimation of Defect proneness Using Design complexity Measurements in Object- Oriented Software

Software engineering is continuously facing the challenges of growing complexity of software packages and increased level of data on defects and drawbacks from software production process. This makes a clarion call for inventions and methods which can enable a more reusable, reliable, easily maintainable and high quality software systems with deeper control on software generation process. Quality and productivity are indeed the two most important parameters for controlling any industrial process. Implementation of a successful control system requires some means of measurement. Software metrics play an important role in the management aspects of the software development process such as better planning, assessment of improvements, resource allocation and reduction of unpredictability. The process involving early detection of potential problems, productivity evaluation and evaluating external quality factors such as reusability, maintainability, defect proneness and complexity are of utmost importance. Here we discuss the application of CK metrics and estimation model to predict the external quality parameters for optimizing the design process and production process for desired levels of quality. Estimation of defect-proneness in object-oriented system at design level is developed using a novel methodology where models of relationship between CK metrics and defect-proneness index is achieved. A multifunctional estimation approach captures the correlation between CK metrics and defect proneness level of software modules.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

Evaluation Criteria for Object-oriented Metrics

In this paper an evaluation model for object-oriented (OO) metrics is proposed. We have evaluated the existing evaluation criteria for OO metrics, and based on the observations, a model is proposed which tries to cover most of the features for the evaluation of OO metrics. The model is validated by applying it to existing OO metrics. In contrast to the other existing criteria, the proposed model is simple in implementation and includes the practical and important aspects of evaluation; hence it suitable to evaluate and validate any OO complexity metric