Measuring Object-Oriented Design Principles

The idea of automatizing the assessment of object-oriented design is not new. Different approaches define and apply their own quality models, which are composed of single metrics or combinations thereof, to operationalize software design. However, single metrics are too fine-grained to identify core design flaws and they cannot provide hints for making design improvements. In order to deal with these weaknesses of metric-based models, rules-based approaches have proven successful in the realm of source-code quality. Moreover, for developing a well-designed software system, design principles play a key role, as they define fundamental guidelines and help to avoid pitfalls. Therefore, this thesis will enhance and complete a rule-based quality reference model for operationalizing design principles and will provide a measuring tool that implements these rules. The validation of the design quality model and the measurement tool will be based on various industrial projects. Additionally, quantitative and qualitative surveys will be conducted in order to get validated results on the value of object-oriented design principles for software development.