A Novel Approach for Improving the Quality of Software Code using Reverse Engineering

Abstract

Copying and pasting program code fragments with minor changes is a common practice in software development. Software systems often have similar segments of code, called code clones. Due to many reasons, unintentional smells may also appear in the source code without awareness of program developers. Code smell may violate the principles of software design and negatively impact program design quality, thus making software development and maintenance very costly. This paper presents an enhanced approach to facilitate the process of identification and elimination of code smells. The proposed solution allows the detection and removal of code smells for refinement and improvement of the quality of software system. Code smells are analyzed, restructured and eliminated from the source code using reverse engineering techniques. The solution maintains the external behaviour of software system and judges the efficiency of systems code. An experiment has been conducted using a real software system, which is evaluated before and after using the approach. The results have been encouraging and help in detecting code smells.