Using software metrics for automatic software design improvement

Abstract

In this paper we are approaching the problem of improving the quality of a software system design, an important issue during the evolution of object oriented software systems. Starting from the fact that software metrics are essential in measuring the software quality, we introduce a metric based high dimensional representation of the elements of a software system (application classes and methods from the application classes) and we define a distance semi-metric between the elements of the software system. An experimental validation of the distance semi-metric on two case studies is provided. The obtained results illustrate that the distance function introduced in this paper can be successfully used for improving the internal structure of software systems, highlighting this way the potential of our proposal.