DEQUALITE: building design-based software quality models

Abstract

Object-oriented software quality models usually use metrics of classes or of relationships between classes to measure internal attributes of systems. However, the quality of these systems does not depend on classes solely: It also depends on the organisation of classes, i.e., their design. We propose DEQUALITE, a method to build models to measure the quality of systems taking into account both their internal attributes and their designs. Our method uses a machine learning approach and also allows combining different models to improve the quality prediction. In this paper, we justify the use of patterns to build quality models, we illustrate our method on a set of systems implementing design patterns and on the quality model QMOOD from Bansiya et al. We discuss the advantages and limitations of this method, we then present a validation of a resulting quality model on a set of systems. We conclude on the advantages of using patterns to build models and the difficulty of doing so.