Improving object-oriented design quality
Johannes Bräuer, Matthias Saft, Reinhold Plösch, Christian Körner · 2017
Current software development trends have shortened release cycles and forced developers to implement short-term solutions that cannot cope with increasing product complexity. This phenomenon of introducing hasty design choices or applying bad design practices becomes something known as technical debt, in particular design debt. To pay off this debt, the literature offers approaches for identifying these design flaws; however, few methods for properly prioritizing investment efforts are available. In this paper, we propose an approach that supports the decision-making process regarding design improvements. It identifies violations of design best practices that are then arranged within a two-dimensional portfolio matrix. This matrix combines the importance of practices of design quality with actual achievement relative to a benchmark suite. To show the application of the approach in a quality-improvement process, we performed a feasibility study on three open-source projects and a benchmark suite containing 50 projects. This study clearly shows that the importance of the design best practices greatly impacts the improvement decisions and must be aligned with the strategic quality goals of the product.