Software measurement is an essential management tool to develop robust and maintainable software systems. Software metrics can be used to control the inherent complexities in software design. To guarantee that the components of the software are inevitably testable, the testability attribute is used, which is a sub-characteristics of the software's maintabilility as well as quality assurance. This study investigates the relationship between static code and test metrics and testability and test cases effectiveness. The study answers three formulated research questions. The results of the analysis showed that size and complexity metrics are suitable for predicting the testability of object-oriented classes.
Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both practitioners and researchers in the last several decades. Reviewing and getting an overview of the entire state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in this area is often challenging for a practitioner or a new researcher. Objective: Our objective is to summarize the body of knowledge in this area and to benefit the readers (both practitioners and researchers) in pr…
Testability is the probability whether tests will detect a fault, given that a fault in the program exists. How efficiently the faults will be uncovered depends upon the testability of the software. Various researchers have proposed qualitative and quantitative techniques to improve and measure the testability of software. In literature, a plethora of reliability growth models have been used to assess and measure the quantitative quality assessment of software during testing and operational phase. The knowledge about failure distribution and their complexity can improve the testability of soft…
Evaluating Software testability can assist software managers in optimizing testing budgets and identifying opportunities for refactoring. In this paper, we abandon the traditional approach of pursuing testability measurements based on the correlation between software metrics and test characteristics observed on past projects, e.g., the size, the organization or the code coverage of the test cases. We propose a radically new approach that exploits automatic test generation and mutation analysis to quantify the amount of evidence about the relative hardness of identifying effective test cases. W…
Measuring testability early in the development life cycle especially at design phase is a criterion of crucial importance to software designers, developers, quality controllers and practitioners. However, most of the mechanism available for testability measurement may be used in the later phases of development life cycle. Early estimation of testability, absolutely at design phase helps designers to improve their designs before the coding starts. Practitioners regularly advocate that testability should be planned early in design phase. Testability measurement early in design phase is greatly e…
The pivotal role of testing in high-quality software production has driven a significant effort in evaluating and assessing testing practices. We explore the state of testing in a large industrial project over an extended period. We study the interplay between bugs in the project and its test cases, and interview developers and stakeholders to uncover reasons underpinning our observations. We realized that testing is not well adopted, and that testability (ie, ease of testing) is low. We found that developers tended to abandon writing tests when they assessed the effort to be high. Frequent ch…
It is generally acknowledged that software testing is both challenging and time-consuming. Understanding the factors that may positively or negatively affect testing effort will point to possibilities for reducing this effort. Consequently there is a significant body of research that has investigated relationships between static code properties and testability. The work reported in this paper complements this body of research by providing an empirical evaluation of the degree of association between runtime properties and class-level testability in object-oriented (OO) systems. The motivation f…
Most businesses rely on a significant stack of software to perform their daily operations. This software is business-critical as defects in this software have major impacts on revenue and customer satisfaction. The primary means for verification of this software is testing. We conducted an extensive analysis of Java software packages to evaluate their unit-testability. The results show that code in software repositories is typically split into portions of very trivial code, non-trivial code that is unit-testable, and code that cannot be unit-tested easily. This brings up interesting considerat…
Unlike most other software quality attributes, testability cannot be evaluated solely based on the characteristics of the source code. The effectiveness of the test suite and the budget assigned to the test highly impact the testability of the code under test. The size of a test suite determines the test effort and cost, while the coverage measure indicates the test effectiveness. Therefore, testability can be measured based on the coverage and number of test cases provided by a test suite, considering the test budget. This paper offers a new equation to estimate testability regarding the size…
Software developers and maintainers need to read and understand source programs and other software artifacts. The increase in size and complexity of software drastically affects several quality attributes, especially understandability and maintainability. False interpretation often leads to ambiguities, misunderstanding and hence to faulty development results. Despite the fact that software understandability is vital and one of the most significant components of the software development process, it is poorly managed. This is mainly due to the lack of its proper management and control. The pape…
Many cost estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades. In this study, we investigate fuzzy ID3 decision tree as a method for software effort estimation. Fuzzy ID software effort estimation model is designed by incorporating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the concepts of the fuzzy settheoretic; permitting the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when presenting the software projects. MMRE (Mean Magnitude of Relative Error) and Pred(l) (Prediction at level l) are used, as measures of prediction accuracy, for this study. A series of experiments is reported us…
The design structure of OO software has decisive impact on its quality. The design must be strongly correlated with quality characteristics like analyzability, changeability, stability and testability, which are important for maintaining the system. But due to the diversity and complexity of the design properties of OO system e.g. Polymorphism, encapsulation, coupling it becomes cumbersome.
Context: Forgetting is defined as a gradual process of losing information. Even though there are many studies demonstrating the effect of forgetting in software development, to the best of our knowledge, no study explores the impact of forgetting in software development using a controlled experiment approach. Objective: We would like to provide insights on the impact of forgetting in software development projects. We want to examine whether the recency & frequency of interaction impact forgetting in software development. Methods: We will conduct an experiment that examines the impact of forget…
This paper aims to discuss the pilot study and analysis of the current development and measurement practices in Jordanian small software firms. It is conducted because most developers build web applications without using any specific development method and don't know how to integrate the suitable measurements inside the process to improve and reduce defect, time and rework of the development life cycle. Furthermore the objectives of this pilot study are firstly; determine the real characteristics of small software firms in Jordan. Secondly, investigate the current development and measurement p…
This paper describes an investigation into value-based software engineering and proposes a comprehensive value taxonomy with an interpretation of design feature implications. The value taxonomy is used to assess the design of Covid19 symptom tracker applications.
Bellwether effect refers to the existence of exemplary projects (called the Bellwether) within a historical dataset to be used for improved prediction performance. Recent studies have shown an implicit assumption of using recently completed projects (referred to as moving window) for improved prediction accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the Bellwether effect on software effort estimation accuracy using moving windows. The existence of the Bellwether was empirically proven based on six postulations. We apply statistical stratification and Markov chain methodology to select the Bellwether …
A growing number of empirical software engineering researchers suggest that a complementary focus on theory is required if the discipline is to mature. A first step in theory-building involves the establishment of suitable theoretical constructs. For researchers studying software projects, the lack of a theoretical construct for context is problematic for both experimentation and effort estimation. For experiments, insufficiently understood contextual factors confound results, and for estimation, unstated contextual factors affect estimation reliability. We have earlier proposed a framework th…
Continuous practices are a staple of the modern software development workflow. Automation, in particular, is widely adopted due to its benefits related to quality and productivity. However, automation, similarly to all other aspects of the software development workflow, interacts with humans (in this case developers). While some work has investigated the impact of automation on developers, it is not clear to what extent context and process influence that impact. We present our ADEPT theory of developers and automation, in an attempt to bridge this gap and identify the possible ways context, pr…
During software evolution, inexperienced developers may introduce design anti-patterns when they modify their software systems to fix bugs or to add new functionalities based on changes in requirements. Developers may also use design patterns to promote software quality or as a possible cure for some design anti-patterns. Thus, design patterns and design anti-patterns are introduced, removed, and mutated from one another by developers. Many studies investigated the evolution of design patterns and design anti-patterns and their impact on software development. However, they investigated design …
Context: In addressing how best to estimate how much effort is required to develop software, a recent study found that using exemplary and recently completed projects [forming Bellwether moving windows (BMW)] in software effort prediction (SEP) models leads to relatively improved accuracy. More studies need to be conducted to determine whether the BMW yields improved accuracy in general, since different sizing and aging parameters of the BMW are known to affect accuracy. Objective: To investigate the existence of exemplary projects (Bellwethers) with defined window size and age parameters, and…
Online creative communities have been able to develop large, open source software (OSS) projects like Linux and Firefox throughout the successful collaborations carried out over the Internet. These communities have also expanded to creative arts domains such as animation, video games, and music. Despite their growing popularity, the factors that lead to successful collaborations in these communities are not entirely understood. In the following, I describe my PhD research project aimed at improving communication, collaboration, and retention in creative arts communities, starting from the expe…
