Metric framework for object-oriented real-time systems specification languages

A method and tool for assessing object-oriented projects and metrics management

“…When software evaluation is performed before system building, metrics are used for predicting costs of development, testing, etc. As pointed out by many authors, traditional metrics for complexity/ size estimation, often used for procedural languages, can be dicult to apply for evaluating object-oriented systems (Li and Henry, 1993;Henderson-Sellers et al, 1994;Nesi and Campanai, 1996). Several interesting studies on predicting and evaluating maintainability, reusability, reliability, and eort for development and maintenance have been presented.…”

“…Some of these metrics are based on well-known functional metrics, such as LOC, McCabe, etc. In Henderson-Sellers (1994) and Nesi and Campanai (1996), issues regarding the external and internal class complexities have been discussed by proposing several metrics. Early metrics, such as the number of local attributes, the number of local methods or the number of local attributes and methods have been frequently used for evaluating the conformance with the``good'' application of the OOP.…”

“…A fully object-oriented metric for evaluating class complexity/size has to consider also attributes and methods both locally de®ned and inherited (Nesi and Campanai, 1996;Nesi and Querci, 1998;Fioravanti et al, 1999b). These factors must be considered for evaluating the cost/gain of inheritance adoption, and that of the other relationships.…”

“…This can be very useful for class evaluation and prediction since the early phase of class life-cycle. The weights and the interpretation scale must be adjusted according to the phase of the system life-cycle in which they are evaluated as in (Nesi and Campanai, 1996;Nesi and Querci, 1998;Fioravanti et al, 1999a).…”

“…Some studies with metrics and measurement frameworks for object-oriented systems have been presented in Laranjeira (1990), Meyer (1990), Henderson-Sellers (1991, 1993, Coulange and Roan (1993), Li and Henry (1993), BritoeAbreu et al (1995), Nesi and Campanai (1996), Bucci et al (1998), Fioravanti et al (1998a,b), Nesi and Querci (1998), and Zuse (1994), where general concepts for the estimation of system size, complexity, and reuse level have been proposed together with many other metrics. Unfortunately, the eort for de®ning new metrics has not been supported by the implementation of assessment tools and methodologies.…”