Metrics to study symptoms of bad software designs

ABSTRACT

Design of a software product largely influences its quality. Good design is one of the pre-requisites of a high quality product. Me-trics are usually used to assess the quality of software designs. The metrics for object oriented design focus on design characteristics, such as abstraction, coupling, cohesion, inheritance, polymorphism and encapsulation and are applied at attribute, method, class, pack-age, file and systems levels. Design metrics help the software de-signers to understand the problem areas in a design and to develop prediction models. A number of studies have modeled relation-ships between object oriented metrics and reusability, defects and faults, maintainability, and effort, and cost savings. So design me-trics can give an early indication of goodness of design and thus of the software product developed using that design. If designers know symptoms of bad design then it is helpful for them to avoid the bad design. In this paper, we have explored some of the symp-toms of bad design and studied metric relationships which high-light these symptoms.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.8 Metrics

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures

General Terms:
Design, Documentation