A comparison of measurement and defect characteristics of new and legacy software systems. Tian, J. & Troster, J. Journal of Systems and Software, 44(2):135--146, 1998.
A comparison of measurement and defect characteristics of new and legacy software systems [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
This paper compares the quality characteristics of a large legacy software system and a new one. Defect fixes applied to specific modules during testing are used as the direct quality metric. Indirect quality indicators used in this paper include software metrics of various product and process attributes, including design, size, change, and complexity. We analyze and compare the measurement results by examining their individual distributions, the correlations between defects and quality indicators, and tree-based models linking defects to quality indicators. In both these systems, most of the defects are found to be concentrated on relatively few high-defect modules, which points to the need for appropriate risk identification techniques so that defect removal effort can be focused on those high-defect modules for effective quality improvement. In addition, defects in the legacy system are more closely related to change and data complexity metrics; while defects in the new system are more closely related to various design metrics. These results demonstrate different measurement characteristics for these two types of software systems, and suggest that different quality analysis and improvement methods may be more appropriate and effective for different kinds of software systems.
@article{ tian_comparison_1998,
  title = {A comparison of measurement and defect characteristics of new and legacy software systems},
  volume = {44},
  issn = {0164-1212},
  url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016412129810050X},
  doi = {10.1016/S0164-1212(98)10050-X},
  abstract = {This paper compares the quality characteristics of a large legacy software system and a new one. Defect fixes applied to specific modules during testing are used as the direct quality metric. Indirect quality indicators used in this paper include software metrics of various product and process attributes, including design, size, change, and complexity. We analyze and compare the measurement results by examining their individual distributions, the correlations between defects and quality indicators, and tree-based models linking defects to quality indicators. In both these systems, most of the defects are found to be concentrated on relatively few high-defect modules, which points to the need for appropriate risk identification techniques so that defect removal effort can be focused on those high-defect modules for effective quality improvement. In addition, defects in the legacy system are more closely related to change and data complexity metrics; while defects in the new system are more closely related to various design metrics. These results demonstrate different measurement characteristics for these two types of software systems, and suggest that different quality analysis and improvement methods may be more appropriate and effective for different kinds of software systems.},
  number = {2},
  urldate = {2014-07-21TZ},
  journal = {Journal of Systems and Software},
  author = {Tian, Jeff and Troster, Joel},
  year = {1998},
  keywords = {Defect, Large software systems, Software metrics, Statistical analysis, Tree-based modeling, _done, _naming_fault_as_defect_model},
  pages = {135--146}
}

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