On Choosing Program Refactoring and Slicing Re-engineering Practice Towards Software Quality

The quality of software depends on its maintainability. Software under evolution is modified and enhanced to accommodate new requirements. As a result, the software becomes more complex and deviates from its original design, in turn lowering the quality. Program Slicing and refactoring as program re-engineering approaches, makes software systems maintainable. Effective slicing and refactoring requires proper metrics to quantitatively establish the improvement in the quality. Software metrics have proven to reflect software quality, and thus have been widely used in software quality evaluation methods. The results of these evaluation methods can be used to indicate which parts of a software system need to be reengineered. The reengineering of these parts is usually performed using refactoring and slicing meaning refactoring and slicing are consciously used as a means to improve the quality of software. Probably the most influential factor for software quality is its design. A good design will allow a software system to evolve with little effort and less cost. Therefore by evaluating the quality of the design of a system one can estimate its overall quality. In this paper, we present refactoring and slicing as promising techniques that enhances software quality and the consideration of these techniques when software maintenance is being considered.