Metrics and Antipatterns for Software Quality Evaluation

In the context of software evolution, many activities are involved and are very useful, like being able to evaluate the design quality of an evolving system, both to locate the parts that need particular refactoring or reengineering efforts, and to evaluate parts that are well designed. This paper aims to give support hints for the evaluation of the code and design quality of a system and in particular we suggest to use metrics computation and antipatterns detection together. We propose metrics computation based on particular kinds of micro-structures and the detection of structural and object-oriented antipatterns with the aim of identifying areas of design improvements. We can evaluate the quality of a system according to different issues, for example by understanding its global complexity, analyzing the cohesion and coupling of system modules and locating the most critical and complex components that need particular refactoring or maintenance.