Visually localizing design problems with disharmony maps
Richard Wettel, Michele Lanza · 2008
Assessing the quality of software design is difficult, as "design" is expressed through guidelines and heuristics, not rigorous rules. One successful approach to assess design quality is based on detection strategies, which are metrics-based composed logical conditions, by which design fragments with specific properties are detected in the source code. Such detection strategies, when executed on large software systems usually return large sets of artifacts, which potentially exhibit one or more "design disharmonies", which are then inspected manually, a cumbersome activity.