A utilidade dos valores referência de métricas na avaliação da qualidade de softwares orientados por objeto

Abstract

Software metrics can be an effective measurement tool to assess the quality of software. In the literature, there are a lot of software metrics applicable to systems implemented in different paradigms like Objects Oriented Programming (OOP). To guide the use of these metrics in the evaluation of the quality of software systems, it is important to define thresholds. Using thresholds’ values, software engineers may identify, for example, critical points for software maintenance and evolution. Several studies have proposed techniques for deriving threshold values; however, an evaluation of them is required. This master thesis presents a systematic mapping of the literature in order to identify how thresholds of software metrics have been applied, in particular, in detect bad smells and failure prediction. These two aspects were considered to be strongly related to the internal quality of the software product. This master thesis analyses the usefulness of the thresholds of object-oriented software metrics to evaluate the quality of software systems was selected. For this research, a threshold catalog of 18 software metrics derived from 100 software systems. In this master thesis, we have defined detection strategies for five bad smells based on the thresholds proposed in this catalog. The aim of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the thresholds in: (i) detection analysis of 12 software systems using the strategies proposed in this master thesis and (ii) application of the thresholds to predict failure in 10 software systems. The main results of these studies show how thresholds of object-oriented software metrics can be used for the detection of bad smells and failure prediction.