Automatic Detection Of Design Flaws In Object Oriented Software Based On Metrics

With the popularity of object-oriented technology, inexperienced developers write low quality code, which lead to inefficient software and decrease its maintainability and extensibility. It turns out to be an urgent issue that how to effectively search and locate software design problems.As for this issue, this paper designs and implements an automatic tool, JMT, which aims to find object-oriented design flaws based on metrics. No measurement, no control. Software measurement is the foundation for software recognition, assessment, prediction and improvement, and thus ensures the quality of software. Since software metrics covers lots of aspects of software engineering, this paper focuses on Java source code metrics for quality analysis.As for the selection of metrics, this paper uses traditional object-oriented metrics, which have been proved to be the"weatherglass"by practice that mostly reflects the design problems. Meanwhile, in order to accommodate the update of Java language, this paper proposes several new metrics which aim to find the design problems related with new features of Java.JMT is implemented based on Eclipse platform and has been released as Eclipse plugin. It realizes automatic quality analysis of source code. Compared with related work, JMT has following advantages: upgrade of Java language will not affect the usage of JMT; source code related to new features of Java 5 can be measured; the report of measured results can be displayed in various formats.