I found an interesting review paper titled “A Systematic Literature Review on the Quality of UML Models” by Marcela Genero, Ana Fernández-Saez, H. James Nelson, Geert Poels, and Mario Piattini. It was published in the Journal of Database Management 22 (3), 46-70, 2011. You can also find it here. The paper aims to determine the… [Continue reading]

The January 2013 issue of “Software & Systems Modeling” contains a new empirical study on UML quality modeling. The paper is titled “Effects of stability on model composition effort: an exploratory study ” by Kleinner Farias, Alessandro Garcia, and Carlos Lucena. The full paper is available for download. Here is my review. The paper investigates… [Continue reading]

In this post we’ll have look at Chapter 7 of Ariadi Nugroho’s PhD Thesis “The Effects of UML Modeling on the Quality of Software”. I’ve previously discussed Chapters 5 and 6 of the thesis, which investigate the impact of the level of detail of UML models on system quality. You can download all those chapters… [Continue reading]

There are quite a few empirical studies that investigate how the structural properties of a system impact external system quality attributes. For example, what is the relationship between class coupling or complexity to its fault-proneness or maintainability? These studies typically measure structural system properties from source code, which is readily available once the systems under… [Continue reading]

Software architects create UML models with varying amounts of rigor and detailedness. Some use UML in an informal manner, as a means to communicate architectural or design decisions. Such use often relies only on a small subset of the graphical notation the UML defines, and pays little regard to the semantics. At the other end… [Continue reading]

This slide by Natallia Kokash from the Software Engineering course of Fall 2011 at Leiden University discusses the metric NOC from Chidamber and Kemerer’s metric suite for object-oriented design: The entire set of presentations is available here. The above slide is no. 65 from the presentation titled “Software Quality”. Thank you Natallia Kokash!

I came across a PhD thesis titled “Quality Assessment and Quality Improvement for UML Models” by Akhtar Ali Jalbani. It was defended in February 2011 at the University Göttingen, Germany. The title seemed promising, so I checked it out. Here’s my review. Thesis Summary Jalbani defines a quality model for UML that distinguishes three life… [Continue reading]

Recently someone asked me why SDMetrics features hardly any cohesion measures “out of the box”, and only for packages, not for classes. In this post, we’ll look at the reasons for this apparent deficiency. The first reason is a practical one: many proposed class cohesion measures can’t be applied to UML models. Class cohesion measures… [Continue reading]