Abstract
Role of packages in organization and maintenance of software systems has acquired vital importance in recent research of software quality. With an advancement in modularization approaches of object oriented software, packages are widely considered as re-usable and maintainable entities of objectoriented software architectures, specially to avoid complicated dependencies and insure software design of well identified services. In this context, recently research study of H. Abdeen on automatic optimization of package dependencies provide composite frame of metrics for package quality and overall source code modularization. There is an opportunity to conduct comprehensive empirical analysis over proposed metrics for assessing their usefulness and application for fault-prediction, design flaw detection, identification of source code anomalies and architectural erosion. In this paper, we examine impact of these dependency optimization based metrics in wide spectrum of software quality for single package and entire software modularization. Our experimental work is conducted over open source software systems through statistical methodology based on cross validation fault-prediction and correlation.We conclude with empirical evidence that dependency based package modularization metrics provide more accurate view for predicting fault-prone packages and improvement of overall software structure. Thus, application of these metrics can help the developers and software practitioners to insure proactive management of the source code dependencies and avoid design flaws during software development.
Highlights
Software engineering is aimed at developing mechanism and tools that automates the manual operation
We evaluated the impact of dependency based Package-Quality metrics towards software quality assurance
Inter-release and intra-release of predictive models were constructed to conclude following: 1) Dependency based Package Quality metrics in combination with traditional package level metrics provide complementary view of fault-proneness of packages. It employs proper management and organization of packages by minimizing the dependencies can enhance the quality and ensure functional stability of software; 2) Comprehensive assessment of post-releases of software can be obtained with dependency based Package Quality metrics to avoid future potential bugs; 3) Dependency based Cohesion and Coupling metrics value improvement can help to keep the software systems up to coding standards and design rules
Summary
Software engineering is aimed at developing mechanism and tools that automates the manual operation. There have been increasing efforts to analyze packages and their architecture in object oriented systems to determine quality attributes of object oriented source code [3], [4]. Software evolution process has been subject to structural and architectural changes in the source code, targeting suitable and organized placement of classes in particular. Such re-factoring practices can cause drift and deterioration in modularization quality of software [5]. To insure flexible software modularization, optimization of package structure and their connectivity can be a vital maintenance task. If quality of package dependencies is evaluated quantitatively, modifying its structural components to avoid potential flaws becomes easier task
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