Assessing design instability in iterative (agile) object‐oriented projects

Abstract

Assessing progress and stability in rapid, highly iterative and agile object-oriented software development processes is difficult because program evolution appears somewhat disorderly. With agile software development methods, the expected time to reach software stability is obscured by the dynamic nature of the agile process itself. The System Design Instability (SDI) metric was developed to help analyze objectoriented software evolution under these conditions. In this paper we examine a new version of SDI, called SDI e , based on the maximum entropy in a system. We believe our new measure is easier to calculate than the original version of SDI since it is based on data that are more commonly available than those used by SDI; also, SDI e gives a more accurate indication of software stability and maturity since it suffers less from data spikes. To validate the new metric, we use maintenance data from a commercial software project, developed using an agile process; these are the same data that were collected and analyzed in the original SDI study. In addition, we apply the refined SDI metric to the evolution of a well-established, open-source, iterativelydeveloped software product. The results of our case study indicate our new SDI e metric is a viable measure of system design stability.

Bug localization using latent Dirichlet allocation

“…Olague et al [25] further refined Alshayeb and Li's SDI metric. Olague et al's SDI e metric used different measures in order to allow the metric to be easier to calculate automatically.…”

“…In addition, SDI e used entropy to dampen the potential effect on the overall system stability values that may be caused by large changes in a single measure. SDI e is defined as follows [25]:…”

Analyzing the Instability of the Core Components of Software Projects

“…The contribution provides information regarding the package and its evolution, enabling the monitoring of trends in software evolution. In order to evaluate the stability of an OO software system developed using an agile design similar to Extreme Programming, the authors in [15] validated the metrics SDI -System Design Instability. In [8], the authors emphasize the diffusion of open source projects, asserting that their success is due to several factors, such as the fact that the developer is also the current user, the sound and the modularity of the architecture.…”

Software Architecture Quality Measurement Stability and Understandability

“…Olague et al [32] utilized entropy to reduce spikes in the original SDI metric that is produced by Li.et al [25] and proposed the new SDIe metric. This study highlighted that the dynamic nature of the agile development process could obscure an analysis of software stability.…”