A Maintainability Framework to Ensure the Software Quality in Object-Oriented Programming

In recent years, there have been significant challenges in the attempt to improve modular structure and code reusability in software development. Software developers should ensure that refactoring not only eliminates code smells but also leads to measurable improvements in software quality metrics....

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access Vol. 13; pp. 195796 - 195821
Main Authors: Rochimah, Siti, Rahmania Hadiningrum, Tiara, Dwi Mardiana, Bella, Oranova Siahaan, Daniel, Januar Akbar, Rizky, Mazharuddin Shiddiqi, Ary
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 2025
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Code reuse
Code smell
Codes
Complexity theory
Effectiveness
ISO Standards
ISO/IEC 25023
Maintainability
mathematical formulation
Measurement
Modular structures
Modularity
Object oriented programming
Software
Software development
Software development management
software maintainability
Software quality
software refactoring
Software reuse
Source code
Systematics
Testability
ISSN:2169-3536, 2169-3536
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In recent years, there have been significant challenges in the attempt to improve modular structure and code reusability in software development. Software developers should ensure that refactoring not only eliminates code smells but also leads to measurable improvements in software quality metrics. Although metric-based approaches allow for objective and systematic measurements, they have limitations. They cannot ascertain the effectiveness of refactoring techniques in terms of readability, code maintainability, and their impact on system performance and developer productivity. This study proposes mathematical formulations for five key metrics: Modularity (MMo-1-G, MMo-2-S), Analysability (MAn-2-S), Reusability (MRe-1-G), and Testability (MTe-1-G). These metrics are used to evaluate and verify the effectiveness of refactoring in improving module separability and code reuse rate. The proposed model is presented in mathematical notation to link the concepts of modularity and reusability with the corresponding refactoring implementation. Case studies are conducted by applying this formulation to various refactoring techniques aimed at addressing specific types of code smells. Based on the metric analysis conducted on 17 types of code smells using three refactoring techniques, the results demonstrate improvements of 11.46% in MMo-1-G, 0.8% in MMo-2-S, 1.2% in MAn-2-S, 0.82% in MRe-1-G, and 3.07% in MTe-1-G. These findings demonstrate that the proposed formulation can be effectively applied to evaluate code quality changes after refactoring and provide more objective insights into code improvement decision-making.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3633265