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The objective of this study is the investigation of the correlation between object-oriented design metrics and the likelihood of the occurrence of object oriented faults. Such a relationship, if identified, can be utilized to select effective testing techniques that take the characteristics of the program under test into account. Our empirical study was conducted on three industrial real-time systems that contain a number of natural faults reported for the past three years. The faults found in these three systems are classified into three types: object-oriented faults, object management faults and traditional faults. The object-oriented design metrics suite proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer (1994) is validated using these faults. Moreover, we propose a set of new metrics that can serve as an indicator of how strongly object-oriented a program is, so that the decision to adopt object oriented testing techniques can be made, to achieve more reliable testing and yet minimize redundant testing efforts.
Tang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.