Towards a Formal Approach for Assessing the Design Quality of Object-Oriented Systems

Towards a Formal Approach for Assessing the Design Quality of Object-Oriented Systems

Mokhtaria Bouslama, Mustapha Kamel Abdi
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/IJOSSP.2021070101
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Abstract

The cost of software maintenance is always increasing. The companies are often confronted to failures and software errors. The quality of software to use is so required. In this paper, the authors propose a new formal approach for assessing the quality of object-oriented system design according to the quality assessment model. This approach consists in modeling the input software system by an automaton based on object-oriented design metrics and their relationship with the quality attributes. The model exhibits the importance of metrics through their links with the attributes of software quality. In addition, it is very practical and flexible for all changes. It allows the quality estimation and its validation. For the verification of proposed probabilistic model (automaton), they use the model-checking and the prism tool. The model-checking is very interesting for the evaluation and validation of the probabilistic automaton. They use it to approve the software quality of the three experimental projects. The obtained results are very interesting and of great importance.
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1. Introduction

Object Oriented design (OO) quality is a topic of great interest for the scientific research and the development of software system. In the maintenance phase of software life cycle, many studies were achieved on OO design quality assurance (Bansiya and Davis, 2002; Chauhan et al., 2014; Srinivasan and Devi, 2014c).

Software quality requires the compliance of software product for defined functions and specified quality level (Card and Agresti, 1987). The guarantee of quality level for a software project requires the quality attributes and appropriate metrics (Arvanitou et al., 2017). On the other hand, The software validity is depending on some quality factors at a certain acceptable level (Blundell et al., 1997).

Metrics can be used to measure the quality of software. Software metrics can be divided into two categories: Product metrics and process metrics (Wand and Weber, 1995):

  • Product Metrics: They are generally used to evaluate the attributes of the software. Product metrics, also known as quality metrics are composed of different metrics and properties including complexity, size, style, usability, functionality, performance and non-reliability.

  • Process Metrics: They are effective to measure the attributes of the software process during the development of software product. Process metrics, also known as management metrics are composed of different metrics and properties including cost, advancement, effort and reusability.

A software quality attribute is calculated or evaluated by a set of metrics (Arvanitou et al., 2017). The authors (Kochar et al., 2017) defined the impact of design metrics on different types of software quality attributes. In this paper, we exploit the relationship between products metrics and quality attributes to propose a new approach for studying the software quality. This approach consists in formal intended modeling for the evaluation of finite state automaton. We give in section 2 the problematic description. Our proposal approach is discussed in section 3. Section 4 is reserved for experimentation. In section 5, we discuss the obtained results. Finally, section 6 closes this paper with a general conclusion and some perspectives.

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Many studies were performed in the context of software design quality. The authors (Rawat et al., 2012) investigated the impact of software metrics on software quality and reliability. Dagpinar and Jahnke presented an empirical study for the maintainability prediction owing to Object-Oriented design metrics (OO) (Dagpinar and Jahnke, 2003). The authors (Abdi et al., 2009; Dahane et al., 2019; Srinivasan and Devi, 2014b) verified the suitability of certain OO design metrics about maintainability.

Subramanyam and Krishnan used CK (Chidamber and Kemerer) metrics to confirm that the metrics play an important role in design aspects (Subramanyam and Krishnan, 2003). The authors (Chauhan et al., 2014) used OO design metrics MOOD (Metrics for OO Design) and CK Metrics to estimate the quality of software product implemented according to the object-oriented paradigm.

The authors (Bansiya and Davis, 2002) proposed a hierarchical model based on OO design metrics and quality attributes for the study and evaluation of OO design quality named QMOOD (Quality Metrics for OO Design). This model is used to generate a quality index for an input software system.

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