An empirical study of software design balance dynamics

The Design Metrics Research Team in the Computer Science Department at Ball State University has been engaged in developing and validating quality design metrics since 1987. Since then a number of design metrics have been developed and validated. One of the design metrics developed by the research team is design balance (DB). This thesis is an attempt to validate the metric DB. In this thesis, results of the analysis of five systems are presented. The main objective of this research is to examine if DB can be used to evaluate the complexity of a software design and hence the quality of the resulting software. Two of the five systems analyzed were student projects and the remaining three were from industry. The five systems analyzed were written in different languages, had different sizes and exhibited different error rates.