An Empirical Study to Validate Metrics for Class Diagrams
Marcela Genero, Mario G. Piattini, Coral Calero · 2002
One of the principal objectives of software engineering is to improve the quality of software products. Quality assurance must be guaranteed from the early stages of the software development life cycle, focusing on high-level design artifacts like class diagrams. Indeed, class diagrams constitute the backbone of objectoriented information systems (OOIS) so, their quality has a great impact on the quality of the product which is finally implemented. To assess class diagram quality, it is useful to have quantitative and objective measurement instruments. After having thoroughly reviewed existing OO measures applicable to class diagrams at a high-level design stage, we presented in a previous work [16, [19] a set of UML class diagram structural complexity metrics, a class diagram internal quality attribute, with the idea that it is related to the external quality of such diagrams. In order to gather empirical evidence that the proposed metrics could be early quality indicators of class diagrams, we carried out a controlled experiment. The aim of which was to investigate the relation between the structural complexity of class diagrams and their maintainability. Keywords.