Impact of Shuffler Design Pattern on Software Quality

Abstract

Modern software has become intricate and versatile due to the worldwide growth of new software technologies. In this regard, the evolution of software quality metrics to support software maintainability is studied. The impact of the Shuffler design pattern on software quality metrics is evaluated in this paper. The Shuffler design pattern provides an efficient design approach for shuffling. The pattern helps to choose generic shuffling alternatives that make the client program loosely coupled, and thus attaining high reusability. A few software quality metrics, which has a higher influence on software reusability and maintainability, are experimented on three gaming applications like Jigsaw, Poker, and Scramble. These gaming applications are redesigned using Shuffler design pattern and a combination of other patterns. The three software quality metrics, which show improvement on the redesigned applications, are McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity, Lack of Cohesion of Methods and Specialization Index. The authors also have tested the pattern with a reusability metrics suite, which measures the reusability of the black-box components of the aforementioned applications without any source code. The results with high cohesive and low coupling values would help software designers in the industry to be more confident in using the Shuffler pattern along with other design patterns. The interdependence of the three software metrics on the software quality attributes is finally tabulated to show their impact on software quality.