Indicators of Structural Stability of Object-Oriented Designs: A Case Study

Abstract

The structural stability of an object-oriented design (OOD) refers to the extent to which the structure of the design is preserved throughout the evolution of the software from one release to the next. This paper empirically investigates potential indicators of measures of structural stability of OODs. Both product-related and process-related indicators are considered. These indicators were evaluated through a case study that involves 13 successive releases of Apache Ant. The results showed that each one of the stability metrics is significantly correlated with at least one of the investigated indicators. To make early predictions of the values of each one of the stability metrics, statistically significant regression models were constructed from subsets of the investigated indicators.