A Conceptual Framework for Object-oriented Design Assessment

Nowadays software systems have a continuous evolution, being enhanced, modified and adopted to new requirements. The code becomes more and more complex and drifts away from its original design. One of the first steps in maintaining an object-oriented system is to assess its design, repeatedly throughout the system development lifecycle. Early identification of those parts of the system that need to be reviewed, ensures a more stable design of the successive versions, hindering errors propagation. The main objective of this research is to define a conceptual framework concerning object-oriented design (OOD) assessment. The proposed evaluation methodology is based on metrics and uses fuzzy analysis for the interpretation of the obtained measurement results. This work could pave the way for providing a complex evaluation methodology through the four layers of abstraction: a meta-model for OOD assessment, defined in a standard terminology and formalism using algebraic knowledge, a library of OOD metrics definitions, setting the assessment objectives and a method for the assessment results interpretation. Furthermore, the proposed model is general and scalable and allows other properties and interactions to be added.