Evaluating the quality of reverse engineered object-oriented designs

Software quality is a multifaceted concept that can be described from different perspectives. Five perspectives are the transcendental view, user view, manufacturing view, product view, and value-based view. The definition of software quality is based upon the perspective taken. However, these views do not address the design phase of the software lifecycle. Moreover, the issues pertinent to forward engineering do not necessarily parallel those pertinent to reverse engineering. The quality of a forward engineered design can be discussed in several contexts, such as how well the design represents the requirements specification or the evaluation of the design using a given set of metrics. In reverse engineering, however, this is not the case. The issues involved in evaluating the quality of an object-oriented design extracted from an imperative language differ from those involved in evaluating a forward engineered object-oriented design. This paper discusses the shortcomings of measuring the quality of a reverse engineered object-oriented design using current models based on forward engineering, and offers insights to a plausible solution.