Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2002

Assessing Object-Oriented Conceptual Models Maintainability

Marcela Genero Bocco, José Ángel Olivas Varela, Mario Piattini Velthuis

ER (Workshops) · 2002 · 13 citations (OpenAlex)

Conceptual modeling has become a key task in the early phases of object oriented (OO) software life cycle. In the development of OO software class diagrams represent the conceptual schema that reflects not only the objects of the application domain but also the behaviour of them. Indeed, class diagrams constitute the backbone of OO software so, their quality has a great impact on the quality of the product which is finally implemented. To assess class diagram quality, it is useful to have quantitative and objective measurement instruments. After having thoroughly reviewed existing OO measures applicable to class diagrams at a high-level design stage, we defined a set of metrics for UML class diagram structural complexity (and internal quality attribute), with the idea that it is related to maintainability of such diagrams. In order to gather empirical evidence that the proposed metrics could be early indicators of class diagrams maintainability, we carried out a controlled experiment. The main goal of this paper is to show each of the steps of the experimental process, and how we have built a prediction model for class diagram maintainability based upon the data collected in the experiment using a novel process, the Fuzzy Prototypical Knowledge Discovery process.