Towards a metrics suite for object oriented design

Abstract

This paper presents theoretical woric that builds a suite of metrics for object-oriented design.In particular, these metrics are based upon measurement theory and are also informed by the insights of experienced object-oriented software developers. In evaluating these metrics against a standard set of criteria, they are found to both (a) perform relatively well, and (b) suggest some ways in which Lhe object oriented approach may differ in terms of desirable or necessary design features from more traditional approaches.In order for object-oriented software production to fulfill its promise in moving software development and maintenance from the current 'craft' environment into something more closely resembling conventional engineering, it will require metrics of the process to aid the software management, project planning and project evaluation functions. While software metrics are a generally desirable feature in any software environment, they are of special imponance in the object-oriented approach, since it represents a non-trivial technological change for the organization.The metrics presented in this paper are the first steps in a project aimed at measuring and evaluating the use of object oriented design principles in organizations.

Assessing Inheritance for the Multiple Descendant Redefinition Problem in OO Systems

“…Chidamber and Kemerer [9,10] proposed a suite of six metrics for assessing the complexity of an OO model, 2 of which are related to the metrics described earlier.…”

“…For example, the redefinition metric results for the Smalltalk class library (Fig. 4) show that the amount of redefinition reaches 57.07% at DIT=4 (depth of inheritance metric [9]) in the hierarchy. On the first three levels of the hierarchy, the results obtained more than double from one level to another, denoting high "redefinition activity".…”

“…This paper shows how the complete method redefinition mechanism in a superclass-subclass relationship pinpoints potential design problems in ancestors classes. The increased interest in metrics for OO systems has been significant in the last five years [1,9,10,15,16,20,22,23,24,25] following the pioneering work of Chidamder and Kemerer [9] with their OO metrics suite. We show how the use of measurement techniques for assessing the mechanism of method redefinition provides insights into the overall behaviour of a class hierarchy.…”

An Access Control Metric Suite for Class Hierarchy of Object-Oriented Software Systems

“…Object oriented product metrics measure the effectiveness of object oriented technique. The OO approach metrics get its pace after the proposal of metric suite by Chidamber&Kemerer [1], [2] in 1994 and its exploratory analysis in 1998 [3]. Large research works have been conducted to validate CK Metric suite.…”

Untitled

“…A large number of object-oriented (OO) measures have been proposed in the literature ( [5], [11], [13], [14], [18], [21], [23], [24], [25], [26]). A particular emphasis has been given to the measurement of design artifacts, in order to help assess quality early on during the development process.…”