Detecting design flaws via metrics in object-oriented systems

The industry is nowadays confronted with large-scale monolithic and inflexible object-oriented software. Because of their high business value, these legacy systems must be re-engineered. One of the important issues in re-engineering is the detection and location of design flaws, which prevent the efficient maintenance and further development of the system. In this paper, we present a metrics-based approach for detecting design problems, and we describe two concrete techniques for the detection of two well-known design flaws found in the literature. We apply our technique to an industrial case study and discuss the findings. The proposed technique indeed found real flaws in the system and the experiment suggests that, based on the same approach, further detection techniques for other common design flaws could be defined