An empirical investigation of an object-oriented design heuristic for maintainability

  • Authors:

  • Ignatios Deligiannis;Martin Shepperd;Manos Roumeliotis;Ioannis Stamelos

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Informatics, Technological Education Institute of Thessaloniki, 54101 Thessaloniki, Greece;Design, Engineering and Computing, Bournemouth Universit, BH1 3LT Bournemouth, UK;Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece;Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This empirical study has two goals. First, to investigate the impact of a design heuristic on the maintainability of object-oriented designs, namely the 'god class' problem. In other words, we wish to better understand to what extent a specific design heuristic contributes to the quality of designs developed. The second goal is to investigate the relationship between that OO design heuristic and metrics. Namely, are we able to capture a specific design heuristic by applying a suitable subset of design metrics? The results of this study show that: (a) the investigated design heuristic significantly affects the performance of the participants; (b) it also affects the evolution of design structures; and (c) there is a considerable relationship between that design heuristic and metrics so that it could be feasible to conduct an assessment by using appropriate metrics.