Development of a Software Design Error Taxonomy: A Systematic Literature Review

The Software design process involves a high degree of human interaction and design artifacts creation by software engineers. Software designers use their experience to make assumptions and decisions. Therefore, the software design is prone to errors that lead to a bad quality software. Software engineering literature focuses on software errors and failures. This research relates the concept of human and organizational errors to the errors committed by software engineers during the software design phase to improve software quality. The authors performed a systematic literature review (SLR) of the software engineering to identify software design errors and later classify them. The outcome is a software design errors taxonomy that provides errors and a way to classify those errors based on their similarities and origin. This research proposes a guide to comprehend common software design errors. The guide will allow software engineers to focus and create robust software design. The guide also provides a structured approach to detect software design errors upfront during the software design inspection process. Software development organizations can use this awareness to develop countermeasures to help with error prevention, thereby improving the overall software quality.