Generalization Index: Defining a metric for the detection of smells in UML Class Diagrams in Eclipse Modeling Framework in Eclipse

Abstract

In the field of Software Engineering, while designing the software design and maintaining the source code quality, a lot of good and bad practices come into being. With the continuous evolutions in the field of modeling in software development processes, Model Driven Software Development (MDSD), focuses towards the quality of software models. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a graphical notation for expressing object-oriented designs. With its emergence as a modeling standard and being widely accepted by most software development organizations, in this research paper we focus on UML Class Diagrams. Metrics are mathematical models used for measuring. In software engineering, metrics are utilized for measuring quality aspects of software models. A manual model review is very time consuming and prone to errors, so it becomes essential to automate the tasks as effectively as possible. The Eclipse plug-in EMF Metrics supports specification and calculation of metrics wrt. specific EMF based models. A new definition technique for EMF quality assurance can be defined using Java, an OCL query or Henshin Pattern. In this paper we propose an algorithm for the calculation a new metric named Generalization Index Metric (GIX) for Java Code.