New software metric improves maintainability and reduces costs for developers.
The article introduces a new way to measure the quality of software design by considering inherited attributes and methods. This helps in identifying classes that need to be refactored for better software maintainability. The researchers conducted experiments on over 35,000 classes from 16 open-source projects using popular cohesion metrics. The results provide a guideline for selecting classes for refactoring based on the Depth of Inheritance Tree.