Prioritization of code restructuring for severely affected classes under release time constraints

Bad smells help us to look deeper into the problem as they are threat to design principles and quality of software. Redesigning helps us in restructuring code without any change in its external behavior. It is not feasible to restructure each class of the software due release time constraints. Therefore, there is a need to prioritize classes so that effort and quality can be improved. In this study, we have proposed a framework based on the combination of C & K metric suite and eleven types of bad smells. A new metric, Quality Decline Factor (QDF), has been proposed which identify the severity of the classes and helps the software maintenance team to focus only on severely affected code. Pareto analysis is also valid in this study which states that 80% of the code quality can be improved by providing redesigning treatments to 20% of the severely affected code. This study will reduce the work of software maintenance practitioners and will help them to complete their work on time.