A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Geant4 Maintainability Assessed with Respect to Software Engineering References

We report a methodology developed to quantitatively assess the maintainability of Geant4 with respect to software engineering references. The level of maintainability is determined by combining a set of metrics values whose references are documented in literature.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, IEEE NSS/MIC 201

Modeling the object-oriented software process: OPEN and the unified process

A short introduction to software process modeling is presented, particularly object-oriented modeling. Two major industrial process models are discussed: the OPEN model and the Unified Process model. In more detail, the quality assurance in the Unified Process tool (formally called Objectory) is reviewed

A framework for the definition of metrics for actor-dependency models

Actor-dependency models are a formalism aimed at providing intentional descriptions of processes as a network of dependency relationships among actors. This kind of models is currently widely used in the early phase of requirements engineering as well as in other contexts such as organizational analysis and business process reengineering. In this paper, we are interested in the definition of a framework for the formulation of metrics over these models. These metrics are used to analyse the models with respect to some properties that are interesting for the system being modelled, such as security, efficiency or accuracy. The metrics are defined in terms of the actors and dependencies of the model. We distinguish three different kinds of metrics that are formally defined, and then we apply the framework at two different layers of a meeting scheduler system.Postprint (published version

Evaluation Criteria for Object-oriented Metrics

In this paper an evaluation model for object-oriented (OO) metrics is proposed. We have evaluated the existing evaluation criteria for OO metrics, and based on the observations, a model is proposed which tries to cover most of the features for the evaluation of OO metrics. The model is validated by applying it to existing OO metrics. In contrast to the other existing criteria, the proposed model is simple in implementation and includes the practical and important aspects of evaluation; hence it suitable to evaluate and validate any OO complexity metric