On evaluating the impact of the refactoring of architectural problems on software quality

We can improve software quality in different ways and by removing different kinds of problems. In this paper, we focus our attention on architectural problems, as architectural smells or antipatterns represent, we remove some of these problems through refactoring steps and we check the impact that the refactoring has on different quality metrics. In particular, we focus our attention on some Quality Indexes computed by four tools. These tools are used also for the detection of the architectural problems. We present the results and outline different issues related to the impact of the refactoring of these architectural problems on the Quality Indexes and the difficulties in the choice of the problems to be refactored.