D_n-based Design Quality Comparison of Industrial Java Applications

Serguei Roubtsov, Alexander Serebrenik, Mark Van den Brand

The normalized distance from the main sequence, denoted D_n, is a popular object-oriented metric introduced by Martin in 1994. While the metric has been designed for assessment of individual packages it has also been applied in practice to quality assessment of entire software architectures. This gap between the industrial practice and theoretical understanding has been recently addressed for Java open-source systems. Based on study of a benchmarks collection the authors proposed a statistical model characterizing (a) the average value of D_n, and (b) distribution of D_n.
Contribution of the current work is twofold. First, we show feasibility of application of the D_n-based assessment above to commercial Java applications. Second, we validate the approach by showing that the results obtained are consistent with those obtained by means of a series of independent studies, such as layering, presence of cyclic dependencies and Chidamber’s and Kemerer’s metrics.

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Sergey Roubtsov

Bio

Dr. Serguei Roubtsov is a researcher and consultant at the Laboratory for Quality Software (LaQuSo) of Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands). LaQuSo focuses on the industrialization, validation, and application of results of fundamental research in the IT area.

Serguei Roubtsov’s area of research interests is software quality analysis, verification and tooling. As a consultant he is taking part in numerous projects in industry regarding software quality assessment.
Serguei is the lead developer of SQuAVisiT – Software Quality Assessment and Visualization Toolset, core software tooling which LaQuSo uses carrying out its industrial and research projects.