A mapping study on design-time quality attributes and metrics

Arvanitou, Elvira Maria; Ampatzoglou, Apostolos; Chatzigeorgiou, Alexander; Galster, Matthias; Avgeriou, Paris

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2017.01.026

Cited by 41 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Second, this is the first study that collectively provides an estimation of TD principal, based on structural characteristics, and the repayment actions that need to be completed before the optimal system is reached. Current techniques are mostly based upon rule violations, and the proposed refactorings are resolving these violations, not heavily relying on structural aspects that hinder maintainability, such as coupling, cohesion, and complexity [4].…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

JCaliper

Kouros

Chaikalis

Arvanitou

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

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Technical Debt (TD) reflects problems in software maintainability along evolution. TD principal is defined as the effort required for refactoring an existing system to an ideal one (a.k.a. optimal) that suffers from no maintainability problems. One of the open problems in the TD community is that ideal versions of systems do not exist, and there are no methods in the literature for approaching them, even theoretically. To alleviate this problem, in this paper we propose an efficient TD management strategy, by applying Search-Based Software Engineering techniques. In particular, we focus on one specific aspect of TD, namely inefficient software modularity, by properly assigning behavior and state to classes through search space exploration. At the same time, in the context of TD, we: (a) investigate the use of local search algorithms to obtain a near-optimum solution and propose TD repayment actions (i.e., refactorings), and (b) calculate the distance of a design to the corresponding optimal (i.e., a proxy of TD principal). The approach has been implemented in the JCaliper Eclipse plugin enabling a case study, which validates the approach and contrasts it to existing measure of software evolution. CCS CONCEPTSSoftware and its engineering → Software creation and management → {Software development techniques → Objectoriented development, Software verification and validation → Empirical software validation}

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Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

JCaliper

Kouros

Chaikalis

Arvanitou

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

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“…In this section, we present the reusability models and indices that have been identified by a recent mapping study on design time‐quality attributes . For each reusability model/index, we present (a) the aspects of the software that are considered (eg, structural quality, documentation, etc.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To guide “ reusers ” in the selection of the most adaptable asset (among the functionally fitting ones), reusability needs to be assessed, ie, the degree to which a certain asset can be reused in other systems. To this end, a wide range of reusability indices have been proposed; these indices are calculated as functions of metric scores that quantify factors that influence reusability. However, several research efforts in the literature on reusability assessment (see Section ) suffer from one or both of the following two limitations: (a) only highlight the parameters that should be considered in reusability assessment, thus, not providing an aggregated reusability measure , or (b) only consider structural aspects of the software asset , ignoring aspects such as documentation, external quality, etc.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

REI: An integrated measure for software reusability

Zozas

Ampatzoglou

Bibi

et al. 2019

J Software Evolu Process

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To capitalize upon the benefits of software reuse, an efficient selection among candidate reusable assets should be performed in terms of functional fitness and adaptability. The reusability of assets is usually measured through reusability indices. However, these do not capture all facets of reusability, such as structural characteristics, external quality attributes, and documentation. In this paper, we propose a reusability index (REI) as a synthesis of various software metrics and evaluate its ability to quantify reuse, based on IEEE Standard on Software MetricsValidity. The proposed index is compared with existing ones through a case study on 80 reusable open-source assets. To illustrate the applicability of the proposed index, we performed a pilot study, where real-world reuse decisions have been compared with decisions imposed by the use of metrics (including REI). The results of the study suggest that the proposed index presents the highest predictive and discriminative power; it is the most consistent in ranking reusable assets and the most strongly correlated to their levels of reuse. The findings of the paper are discussed to understand the most important aspects in reusability assessment (interpretation of results), and interesting implications for research and practice are provided. 1

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“…The paper 1 assists software engineers to make such decisions, by reviewing the literature (investigating 154 papers), and focusing on design-time quality attributes (QAs) and software metrics for quantifying them. The paper aims at aiding practitioners in applying a quality assurance process: First, based on the application domain and the development phase that they are interested (e.g., generic and maintenance, respectively), they can identify the QAs that are more frequently studied (e.g., Maintainability, Stability, and Changeability see Fig.…”

Section: Fig 1 Motivation Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%