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user documents, standards, etc. or from someone's perceptions or experiences
. This
definition is very broad, so that different persons can found different anomalies in the
same software artifact, and even the anomalies that found one person could be don't
perceived as anomalies for other person. This situation has caused that many re-
searchers redefine the concepts of error, defect, failure, fault, etc.; and that many
times these concepts have been used indistinctly [8]. In order to avoid the prolifera-
tion of concepts related to the software anomalies, in this paper we analyzes the pro-
posals of defect detection in conceptual models adapting the terminology defined by
Meyer in [27]:
•
Error:
It is a wrong decision made during the development of a conceptual
model.
•
Defect:
It
is a property of a conceptual model that may cause the model to de-
part from its intended behavior.
•
Fault:
It is the event of a software system departing from its intended behavior
during one of its executions.
Taking into account that the costs of faults correction increase exponentially over the
development life cycle [29], it is of paramount importance to discover faults as early
as possible, which means detect errors or defects. The next section shows how a
measurement procedure can be used to identify defects in the conceptual models.
4.1 Using the OOmCFP Measurement Procedure to Detect Defects
Since the measurement of the functional size using the OOmCFP approach has defined
rules to perform the mapping between the concepts of COSMIC and OO-Method, and
rules to identify the data movements of the final application in the conceptual model; it
is possible to identify some defects that impede the compilation of the conceptual model
or that cause faults in the generated application.
The main concepts of the models that comprise the OO-Method conceptual model
are well-known because they are the same as those used in the UML diagrams [10].
However, for a better understanding of the defects that can be identified, the OO-
Method models and their conceptual constructs (which are used by OOmCFP) are
briefly described in the following paragraphs.
The object model of the OO-Method approach describes the static part of the sys-
tem. This model allows the specification of classes, attributes, derived attributes,
events, transactions, operations, preconditions, integrity constraints, agents, and rela-
tionships between classes. In this model, the
agents
are active classes that can access
specific attributes of the classes of the model and that can execute specific services of
the classes of the model.
The functional model of the OO-Method approach allows the specification of the
effects that the execution of an event has over the value of the attributes of the class
that owns the event by means of a
valuation formula
.
The presentation model allows the specification of the graphical user interface of
an application in an abstract way [28]. To do this, the presentation model has a set of
