A comprehensive empirical validation of design measures for object-oriented systems

This paper aims at empirically exploring the relationships between existing object-oriented coupling, cohesion, and inheritance measures and the probability of fault detection in system classes during testing. The underlying goal of such a study is to better understand the relationship between existing design measurement in OO systems and the quality of the software developed. Results show that many of the measures capture similar dimensions in the data set, thus reflecting the fact that many of them are based on similar principles and hypotheses. Besides the size of classes, the frequency of method invocations and the depth of inheritance hierarchies seem to be the main driving factors of fault-proneness.