Hierarchical Model for Evaluating Software Design Quality

Quality of software design has a decisive impact on several quality attributes of the resulting product. However, simple metrics, despite of their popularity, fail to deliver comprehensive information about the reasons of the anomalies and relation between them and metric values. More complex models that combine multiple metrics to detect a given anomaly are still only partially useful without proper interpretation. In the paper we propose a hierarchical model that extend the Factor-Strategy model defined by Marinescu in two ways: by embedding a new interpretation delivery mechanism into the model and extending the spectrum of data providing input to the model.