Prioritization of god class design smell: A multi-criteria based approach

Abstract

Context: Design smell Prioritization is a significant activity that tunes the process of software quality enhancement and raises its life cycle. Objective: A multi-criteria merge strategy for Design Smell prioritization is described. The strategy is exemplified with the case of God Class Design Smell. Method: An empirical adjustment of the strategy is performed using a dataset of 24 open source projects. Empirical evaluation was conducted in order to check how is the top ranked God Classes obtained by the proposed technique compared against the top ranked God class according to the opinion of developers involved in each of the projects in the dataset. Results: Results of the evaluation show the strategy should be improved. Analysis of the differences between projects where respondents answer correlates with the strategy and those projects where there is no correlation should be done.