Evaluating the correlation between software defect and design coupling metrics

Evaluating the software quality and discovering problems of a quality as early as possible in the project is a major goal in software project management planning. Studying the correlation between software products' attributes and its high-level quality attributes has been the subject of several research papers. In this paper, several design coupling metrics are built in a software tool. A case study of several projects is assembled to evaluate the value and validity of the developed coupling metrics. The analysis is also conducted to evaluate the correlation between design and code coupling metrics. Results showed that a significant subset of those metrics could be very useful indicators for the overall software quality.