Assessing the Relationship between Software Assertions and Code Quality : An Empirical Investigation

The use of assertions in software development is thought to help produce quali ty software. Unfortunately, there is scant empirical evidence in commercial soft ware systems for this argument to date. This paper presents an empirical case study of two commer cial software components at Microsoft Corporation. The developers of these components syst ematically employed assertions, which allowed us to investigate the relationship bet ween software assertions and code quality. We also compare the efficacy of assertions agains t th t of popular bug finding techniques like source code static analysis tools. We obser ve from our case study that with an increase in the assertion density in a file there is a statistically significant decrease in fault density. Further, the usage of software assertions in these co mponents found a large percentage of the faults in the bug database.

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