The Impact of Module Attributes on Project Defect Density

Abstract

Context Software modules are the basic building blocks of any software project and these modules are engineered differently for different types of projects. Having a diversity of engineering practice, the attributes of these modules should have different impact on projects. Objective We studied 54 software projects to analyze the impact of modules attributes on the project’s quality in term of defect density (DD). Results We found that the module’s attributes i.e. very small modules on size and defect free modules have significant impact on the projects DD. The former more percentage resulted in higher projects DD and later more percentage resulted in lower projects DD. The attribute module dependencies have no significant impact on the projects DD. Moreover, we found that projects type (student, open source) having higher DD have more percentage of modules with higher DD, but this trend is not found in the close source projects. We found the significant relationship of projects DD with the module attributes (defect free and very small). Conclusion Different module attributes have different impact on projects DD and modules behave differently for different types of projects. This empirical work suggests practitioners and researcher with evidence how module attributes affects the projects DD. The authors recommend some suggestions to take into account during the software construction.KeywordsModuleSizeQualityDefect density