An Empirical Study of Evaluating the Correlation between Class Stability and Bad Smells

Abstract

Several quality attributes are used in designing and developing object-oriented software. Some of these quality attributes have high influence on developing desirable high-quality software (i.e. stable software) by reducing the maintenance cost and efforts. One of these quality attributes is stability. Software quality attributes can be affected by many factors. One of these factors is bad smells. The main objective of this empirical study is to investigate the correlations between bad smells and the stability on the level of class. Proper software metrics such as Class Stability Metric (CSM) will be used to measure class stability. In addition, different bad smells such as Fowler bad smells are collected and correlated with CSM. The results show that there is a negative correlation between bad smells and class stability.