Evaluation of the Design Metric to Reduce the Number of Defects in Software Development

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of CK design metrics in reducing software defects, proposing improvements and analyzing their impact through surveys in two companies.

Contribution

It introduces an improved CK metrics approach and assesses its impact on defect reduction during the software design phase.

Findings

Improved CK metrics correlate with fewer defects.

Certain CK metrics significantly affect defect counts.

Survey results support the proposed metric improvements.

Abstract

Software design is one of the most important and key activities in the system development life cycle (SDLC) phase that ensures the quality of software. Different key areas of design are very vital to be taken into consideration while designing software. Software design describes how the software system is decomposed and managed in smaller components. Object-oriented (OO) paradigm has facilitated software industry with more reliable and manageable software and its design. The quality of the software design can be measured through different metrics such as Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) design metrics, Mood Metrics & Lorenz and Kidd metrics. CK metrics is one of the oldest and most reliable metrics among all metrics available to software industry to evaluate OO design. This paper presents an evaluation of CK metrics to propose an improved CK design metrics values to reduce the defects during software design phase in software. This paper will also describe that whether a significant effect of any CK design metrics exists on total number of defects per module or not. This is achieved by conducting survey in two software development companies.