Quality control practice based on design artifacts categories: results from a case study

The current empirical literature suggests that discrepancies between software design artifacts and implementation seems inevitable. The goal of this empirical study is to understand the nature and impact of these discrepancies by a detailed analysis of the design and code artifacts. The case study is based on an object-oriented software development project based on a traditional plan-driven software development process and proposed by an industrial collaborator. Case study results show that the code written is based on different sources. Software components can be created from scratch, added after design, adapted from the redesign of a reused component or implemented from the modification of an existing component. It is found that code components based on design artifacts are indeed victims of erosion once implementation begins. This erosion can be linked to the evolution of the team members' project understanding during implementation. However, the study concludes that this evolution is mostly opportunistic and does not necessarily warrant an evolution toward amelioration. This study proposes a quality control practice based on the category of the implemented components.