Object-Oriented Design Quality

Quantitative measurement of object-oriented design principles (e.g., Single Responsibility Principle, Acyclic Dependency Principle, Information Hiding) directly from the source code.

Motivation 

Measuring object-oriented design is a research topic with some tradition. There exist different approaches for capturing design quality, like Design Patterns, Design Smells or Design Principles. Design Principles (e.g. Single Responsibility Principle, Open-Closed Principle, Information Hiding Principle, Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle) are well discussed and adhering to design principles seems to be a good idea to guide designers and deveopers and to enhance the internal software quality. Currently there is no common understanding how to measure the adherence of software to these design principles. Although there is some related work available that tries to identify and use rough indicators (typically based on metrics) for design principles, there is not yet a comprehensive approach available that allows to guide improvements in object-oriented design driven by measurements of the source code.

Goals

• Collection of design principles and insights into the importance of individual design principles in practice.
• Identification, specification and implementation of rules to measure violations of design principles for the most important design principles.
• An operational quality model that allows to measure and evaluate the design quality (with a focus on design principles) of Java and C++ source code.
• Analysis of the relationship between design principles and overall software qualtiy – driven by the question whether design qualtiy is a major lever for improving the overall software quality.

Results

• MUSE (Muse Understand Script Engine) – a tool that provides 80+ measures for 12 object-oriented design principles.
• SonarQube plugins that allow to define operational quality models for object-oriented design and that allow to analyse the measurement data provided by the MUSE tool.
• The results of a survey on the importance of object-oriented design princples in practice.

Research Spotlights

• Survey on the importance of object-oriented design principles (June 2015)
• Survey on importance of design best practices (December 2016)

Duration
06/2013 – up to now

Partner Siemens Corporate Technology

Contact Reinhold Plösch

Publications