Statechart features and pre-release maintenance defects

Statecharts is a design notation for reactive systems that is part of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and is commonly used in the automotive and telecommunication software industry. In this paper we present a study on how the use of some statechart features correlate to the number of pre-release maintenance defects in large systems developed using mainly this notation. We discuss possible causes for these correlations and conduct a comparative study to verify these. We conclude by providing advice to UML practitioners.