Some architectural features of ada systems affecting defects

  • Authors:

  • William E. Evanco;June Verner

  • Affiliations:

  • Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA;Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA

  • Venue:
  • Ada-Europe'03 Proceedings of the 8th Ada-Europe international conference on Reliable software technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In this study, we discuss some software architecture tradeoffs for Ada83 systems. External and internal complexities are specified for Ada packages and these complexities are related to the numbers of defects uncovered during testing using a non-linear model based on the negative binomial probability distribution. The non-linear associations among the software measures that we investigate are exploited to identify optimal relationships between context coupling and the number of visible declarations. The data we used to develop our model consists of Ada package characteristics from four software systems. Some of the packages are reused from previous projects and nondefect changes may have been made to these packages during the software development process. Therefore, in our defect model, we controlled for these two factors. For the 262 packages that we considered, our research shows that with respect to software defects there is too much context coupling, indicating that the architecture is far from optimum. If less of the workload were delegated to other packages and instead implemented within the package through hidden declarations, then context coupling might be reduced.