Metrics-based Detection of Micro Patterns to improve the Assesment of Software Quality

Object oriented metrics are widely used in software engineering and maintenance activities, in order to cope with the complexity of software systems and assert their quality. Metrics may be combined together or with other kinds of information to provide enriched understanding of the analyzed systems. Software and architectural analysis can also be pursued through the detection of code micro-structures (like micro patterns), that can be considered as a special kind of metrics since they give hints for the presence of problems inside the code, or also as guidelines for software quality assessment. In this paper we will introduce six micro patterns and redefine them according to the commonly used NOM and NOA metrics, in order to support also the detection of classes that are similar to micro patterns. The identification of these instances inside Java systems succeeded in extracting interesting classes that can’t be detected with an exact matching approach.