The industry is nowadays confronted with large-scale monolithic and in exible object-oriented software. Because of their high business value, these legacy systems must be reengineered. One of the important issues in reengineering is the detection and location of the design aws, which prevent an efficient maintenance and further development of the system. In this paper we present a metrics-based approach for detecting design problems, and we describe two concrete techniques for the detection of two well-known design aws found in the literature. We apply our technique on an industrial case-study and discuss the ndings. The experiment shows that the proposed technique found indeed real aws in the system and it suggests that, based on the same approach, further detection techniques for other common designs can be designed.'