Abstract
In object-oriented software development, class design is one of the most significant factors. In order to provide assessments or predictions of class designs, software metrics have been studied in software engineering discipline. When a software metric does not give a reasonable evaluation to a class, we could modify the class structure, and our modification could lead to simplify the class design quality. In order to support such modifications in terms of class structural complexity, an analysis-method with fuzzy graph has been proposed in the past. This is a method for detecting a class member -a method or an attribute- such that it may have a significant impact on the class structural complexity. However, the method effectiveness has never been discussed. The contribution of this paper is to present an empirical study on the effectiveness of that method. In the empirical study, many object-oriented programs (Java classes) are made pseudo modifications, and impacts of those modifications are evaluated by a software metric. The empirical results show that the class members corresponding to the strengthen points in terms of unilaterally connected graph or strongly connected graph could have significant impacts on the class structural complexity. Thus, the above method is useful for class structural analysis.
