On the Impact of Design Flaws on Software Defects

The presence of design flaws in a software system has a negative impact on the quality of the software, as they indicate violations of design practices and principles, which make a software system harder to understand, maintain, and evolve. Software defects are tangible effects of poor software quality. In this paper we study the relationship between software defects and a number of design flaws. We found that, while some design flaws are more frequent, none of them can be considered more harmful with respect to software defects. We also analyzed the correlation between the introduction of new flaws and the generation of defects.