Improving design quality using meta-pattern transformations: a metric-based approach: Research Articles

  • Authors:

  • Ladan Tahvildar;Kostas Kontogiannis

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Seventh European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2003)
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Improving the design quality of large object-oriented systems during maintenance and evolution is widely regarded as a high-priority objective. Furthermore, for such systems that are subject to frequent modifications, detection and correction of design defects may easily become a very complex task that is even not tractable for manual handling. Therefore, the use of automatic or semi-automatic detection and correction techniques and tools can assist reengineering activities. This paper proposes a framework whereby object-oriented metrics can be used as indicators for automatically detecting situations for particular transformations to be applied in order to improve specific design quality characteristics. The process is based both on modeling the dependencies between design qualities and source code features, and on analyzing the impact that various transformations have on software metrics that quantify the design qualities being improved. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.