On Early Phase Fault Estimation in Object-Oriented Development

Chidamber and Kemerer's metrics are well-known object-oriented design complexity metrics. In the evaluations, their metrics were applied to source code because some of them depend on the information that can not be obtained until the end of design phase. This paper proposes a new method to estimate the fault-proneness of class by using C&K metrics at early design phase. In the proposed method, we introduce four checkpoints into the analysis/design/implementation phase, and use only the applicable metrics among the complexity metrics. Then we estimate the fault-proneness of the class by multivariate logistic analysis.