Exploring the Relationships between Design Metrics and Package Understandability: A Case Study

In object-oriented designs, packages represent important high-level organization units that group classes. This paper explores the relationships between five package-level metrics and the average effort required to understand a package in object-oriented design. These metrics measure different structural properties of a package such as size, coupling and stability. A case study was conducted using eighteen packages taken from two open source software systems. Correlation, collinearity, and multivariate regression analyses were performed. The results obtained from this study indicate statistically significant correlation between most of the metrics and understandability of a package.