Using Object-Oriented Metrics for Automatic Design Flaws Detection in Large Scale Systems

In the last decade the object-oriented paradigm has decisively influenced the world of software engineering. On the other hand, in spite of the large acceptance of this paradigm, at the beginning, the design principles and the intimate mechanisms of object-orientation were not yet precisely known, and this fact conducted to a lot of poor designed large scale OO systems. In other words, these applications mostly proved to be critical exactly in those aspects where object-oriented design should have offered its most expected benefits – e.g. high degree of code reuse, higher maintainability or flexibility, etc. The general tendency manifested in the last time is to redesign these older industrial object-oriented systems, so that they may take full advantage of the today’s knowledge in objectorientation, and thus improve the quality of their design.