An Experimental Evaluation of the Effect of SOLID Principles to Microsoft VS Code Metrics

Abstract

Software maintenance is necessary for reasons such as changes in user needs, changes in theoperating conditions of the system due to changes in the infrastructure, the occurrence ofunforeseen errors. The suitability of the software for maintenance operations is a significantinfluence in reducing the cost. Using only basic object oriented programming concepts do notshow that we are writing maintainable code in our applications. Object oriented designprinciples such SOLID are about reducing dependencies and increasing maintainability.ISO/IEC 9126 is about maintainability but ISO/IEC 9126 is not clear about whether all inputsto measurement should be used together in conjunction or whether they should be used asappropriate or available. Indeed, ISO/IEC 9126 provides no guidance, heuristics, rules of thumb,or any other means to show how to trade off measures, how to weight measures or even how tosimply collate them. In this study each sub-characteristic of ISO/IEC maintainability with helpof Visual Studio (VS) code metric tool is assessed. The focus of this assessment is onmaintainability and its sub-characteristics like analyzability, testability, changeability andstability. Before doing an analysis, each sub-characteristics of maintainability part of ISO/IEC9126 standard are mapped to five VS code metrics for measurement of characteristics. This workshows the effect of object oriented design principles (SOLID) to the maintainability, complexityand flexibility of the code while associating ISO/IEC, VS code metric and SOLID.