On the Relationship Between Change Coupling and Software Defects

Author

D´Ambros, Marco ; Lanza, Michele ; Robbes, Romain

Author_Institution

Fac. of Inf., REVEAL, Univ. of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

fYear

2009

fDate

13-16 Oct. 2009

Firstpage

135

Lastpage

144

Abstract

Change coupling is the implicit relationship between two or more software artifacts that have been observed to frequently change together during the evolution of a software system. Researchers have studied this dependency and have observed that it points to design issues such as architectural decay. It is still unknown whether change coupling correlates with a tangible effect of design issues, i.e., software defects.In this paper we analyze the relationship between change coupling and software defects on three large software systems. We investigate whether change coupling correlates with defects, and if the performance of bug prediction models based on software metrics can be improved with change coupling information.

Keywords

software maintenance; software metrics; software reliability; bug prediction model performance; software artifact; software change coupling; software defect; software metrics; software system; Computer architecture; Informatics; Information analysis; Joining processes; Predictive models; Reverse engineering; Software design; Software measurement; Software metrics; Software systems; Change coupling; Software defects;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Reverse Engineering, 2009. WCRE '09. 16th Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Lille

ISSN

1095-1350

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-3867-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WCRE.2009.19

Filename

5328803