Measuring Object-Oriented Design Principles

TL;DR

This paper develops and validates a rule-based measurement tool to assess object-oriented design principles, addressing limitations of metric-based models and aiding software quality improvement.

Contribution

It enhances a rule-based quality model for object-oriented design principles and provides a measurement tool validated through industrial projects and surveys.

Findings

Validated the measurement tool's effectiveness in industrial settings

Demonstrated the importance of design principles in software quality

Provided insights into improving object-oriented design practices

Abstract

The idea of automatizing the assessment of objectoriented design is not new. Different approaches define and apply their own quality models, which are composed of single metrics or combinations thereof, to operationalize software design. However, single metrics are too fine-grained to identify core design flaws and they cannot provide hints for making design improvements. In order to deal with these weaknesses of metric-based models, rules-based approaches have proven successful in the realm of source-code quality. Moreover, for developing a well-designed software system, design principles play a key role, as they define fundamental guidelines and help to avoid pitfalls. Therefore, this thesis will enhance and complete a rule-based quality reference model for operationalizing design principles and will provide a measuring tool that implements these rules. The validation of the design quality model and the measurement tool will be based on various industrial projects. Additionally, quantitative and qualitative surveys will be conducted in order to get validated results on the value of object-oriented design principles for software development