Preliminary Measurements in Identifying Design Flaws
Abstract
Software metrics are of great importance in object-oriented design assessment. They quantify various aspects of design entities and play an important role in predicting design quality. Despite the fact that software metrics have become increasingly useful, they raise several issues. Among them, relevant to our research are the issue of setting threshold values and the problem of measurement results interpretation. Fuzzy clustering analysis is used to overcome the limitations of the existing approaches that are using threshold values for metrics and to provide a better interpretation of the obtained measurement results. This paper focuses on metrics-based design flaw detection in object-oriented design. A new metric, Design Flaw Entropy which measures the distribution of design flaws into the analyzed system is introduced. To validate the proposed approach, a case study was also proposed.
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