An Emergent Design Approach to test the Quality of the Software System

Abstract

The organizations involved in software production have an interest in ensuring that the software developed conforms to a practice accepted by industry, namely compliance with standards, excellent quality control, efficiency and timeliness. Therefore, emergent design is an appropriate solution for acquiring higher quality software at low cost but meeting the production deadline. Indeed, it aims to reduce technical debt, accidental complexity as well as hyper-genericity contained in a software development process. In this article, we propose an approach supporting the modeling of emergent design, which is a way to make it easy for a designer to test the design quality of an object-oriented system. Our strategy is to define the necessary steps for the realization of emergent design within the software development process. Therefore, emergent design elements that make up our model are redundancy, readability, testability, cohesion, coupling and refactoring. As a case study, we instantiate in the proposed model a UML class diagram to test its design quality in order to improve the diagram if necessary. In order to validate our approach, we evaluated the performance of the UML class diagram obtained after the realization of emergent design proposed in this paper using the CM-Builder’s technique. The result of the performance evaluation with a high score of 93.61% concerning the accuracy of the proposed approach allows us to deduce that the method presented in this paper is essential for software designers in order to achieve a modular and easy to maintain system.