The Automated analysis of object-oriented designs

This thesis concerns the use of software measures to assess the quality of object-oriented designs. It examines the ways in which design assessment can be assisted by measurement and the areas in which it can't. Other work in software measurement looks at defining and validating measures,or building prediction systems. This work is distinctive in that it examines the use of measures to help improve design quality during design time. To evaluate a design based on measurement results requires a means of relating measurement values to particular design problems or quality levels. Design heuristics were used to make this connection between measurement and quality. A survey was carried out to find suggestions for guidelines, rules and heuristics from the 00 design literature. This survey resulted in a catalogue of 288 suggestions for 00 design heuristics. The catalogue was structured around the 00 constructs to which the heuristics relate, and includes information on various heuristic attributes. This scheme is intended to allow suitable heuristics to be quickly located and correctly applied. Automation requires tool support. A tool was built which augmented the functionality available in existing sets, and taking input from multiple sources of design information (e.g., CASE tools and source code) and the described so far presents a potential method for automated design assessment provides the means of automation. An empirical study was then required to consider the efficacy of the method and evaluate the novel features of the tool. A case study was used to explore the approach taken by, and evaluate the effectiveness of, 15 subjects using measures and heuristics to assess the design of a small 00 system(IS classes). This study showed that semantic heuristics tended to highlight significant problems, but where attempts were made to automate these it often led to false problems being identified. This result, along with a previous finding that around half of quality criteria are not automatically assessable at design time, strongly suggeststhat people are still a necessary part of design assessment. The main result of the case study was that the subjects correctly identified 90% of the major design problems and were very positive about their experience of using measurement to support design assessment

The automated analysis of object-oriented designs

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An Empirical Analysis of Linear Adaptation Techniques for Case-Based Prediction

This paper is an empirical investigation into the effectiveness of linear scaling adaptation for case-based software project effort prediction. We compare two variants of a..

Towards the Development of Adequacy Criteria for Object-Oriented Systems

In this paper we present a model that we are using for the development of adequacy criteria for objectoriented systems. The model is defined in a rigorous manner using a multi-level grammar. We focus on objects and the interactions occurring within and between objects in a cluster. We apply this model in a case-study for measuring test adequacy for a cluster in a commercial system. This shows that the development of coverage criteria based on this model is justified. keywords: testing, adequacy criteria, objectoriented, structural coverage 1 Introduction Object-oriented testing has become a key issue in the development of OO technology. In recent years, research has explored the difficulties associated with the specification and management of testing for object-oriented systems. See for example [1, 8, 11]. One question of particular interest in testing is that of test adequacy. Many of the existing techniques for adequacy measurement focus on the coverage of code structure during tes..