Testability Assessment of Object Oriented Software Using Static Metric Model and Analytic Hierarchy Process Dr. Pushpa R. Suri 1 , Harsha Singhani 2 1 2 Department of Computer Science and Applications, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, Haryana, India Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science and Applications, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, Haryana, India Abstract Based on existing software testability models for object oriented software, we have proposed a new testability assessment model for object oriented software. The model is based on those six important internal programming features of object oriented design which are not used before together at the same time in-spite of being highlighted in some or other research. These factors are assessed using popular static object oriented metrics and their link with testability is established. The model is further analysed using Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach. The model would be validated using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The proposed model and evaluation technique helps software engineering practitioners to choose the best alternative amongst available options by analysing the Testability. Keywords: Software Testability Assessment Model, Object Oriented Testability, Static Metric, AHP. 1. Introduction Testability is one of the qualitative factors of software engineering which has been accepted in McCall and Boehm software quality model, which built the foundation of ISO 9126 software quality model. Formally, Software testability has been defined and described in literature from different point of views IEEE [1] defines it as “The degree to which a system or component facilitates the establishment of test criteria and performance of tests to determine whether those criteria have been met” and ISO [2] has defined software testability as functionality or “attributes of software that bear on the effort needed to validate the software product”. The testability research actually is done from the prospect of reducing testing effort and testing cost which is more than 40% of total development cost of any software [3]. Still, the research in the field of testability has not been done in much detail. As discussed in our previous work about testability and testability metrics [4], [5], it has been found that testability research has taken a speed up in past few years only. Tough, much of the work has been done using various object oriented featured metrics only. In this paper we have proposed a testability model for assessment during design time and evaluated the same using AHP technique. This paper is organized as follows: Section2 gives brief overview of software testability related work. Section3 showcases the proposed testability assessment model from design perspective. Section4 provides overview of material and methodology used during this research. Section5 presents the details of testability evaluation based on proposed model using AHP. It is followed by result and findings in section with conclusion drawn in section 7. 2. Related Work 2.1 Software Testability Software testability measurement refers to the activities and methods that study, analyze, and measure software testability during a software product life cycle. Unlike software testing, the major objective of software testability measurement is to find out which software components are poor in quality, and where faults can hide from software testing. Now these measurements can be applied at various phases during software development life cycle of a system. In past number of research efforts were made addressing software testability measurement. The focus of past studies was on how to measure software testability at various software development phases like Design Phase [6]–[13] and Coding Phase[14]–[17]. Lot of stress has been given upon usage of object oriented metrics for object oriented software testability evaluation during these researches. The metrics investigated related to object oriented software testability assessment mostly belong to static software metrics category. These metrics were mostly adapted from CK, MOOD, Brian, Henderson-Sellers metric suite [18]–[21]. Furthermore, Lot of empirical studies has been done in showing the correlation of these metrics with unit testing effort [22]–[25]. Also found that few studies have been focussed on UML diagram features from software testability improvisation prospect during review of these design diagrams [26]–[29]. All this work has been explained in depth in our previous research work [4],[5]. But still very less work has been found in testability analysis using MCDM techniques, in IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Volume 12, Issue 3, May 2015 ISSN (Print): 1694-0814 | ISSN (Online): 1694-0784 www.IJCSI.org 76 2015 International Journal of Computer Science Issues