Software Design Quality: Style and Substance
James M. Bieman, Roger T. Alexander, P. Willard Munger, Erin Meunier · 2002
Many software development texts, references, tools, and authorities provide advise on good software design and programming styles. Unfortunately, most of the evidence to support the value of this advise consists of intuition and anecdotes. We are working to objectively determine the value of recommended style guides on large-scale real world software systems# we are studying both proprietary commercial and open source systems. Our work involves determining whether or not style recommendations are followed, and how these styles affect external quality factors such as faultand change-proneness, and maintainability. Early results indicate that style guidelines are often violated. In addition, we have found that, in contrast with common claims, one design recommendation --- the use of design patterns --- can lead to more change prone , rather than less change prone classes.