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.

Empirical analysis for investigating the effect of object‐oriented metrics on fault proneness: a replicated case study

“…Chidamber and Kemerer (1994) Coupling between objects (CBO1) Same as CBO, except that inheritance-based coupling is not counted. Chidamber and Kemerer (1991)…”

“…Response for a class (RFC) It is defined as set of methods that can be potentially executed in response to a message received by an object of that class. It is given by RFC = |RS|, where RS, the response set of the class, is given by Chidamber and Kemerer (1991) ACAIC These coupling metrics count number of interactions between classes.…”

“…The NOC is the number of immediate subclasses of a class in a hierarchy. Chidamber and Kemerer (1991)…”

“…The depth of a class within the inheritance hierarchy is the maximum number of steps from the class node to the root of the tree and is measured by the number of ancestor classes. Chidamber and Kemerer (1991) Class-to-leaf depth (CLD) It counts the maximum number of levels below a class in the hierarchy. Tegarden et al (1995) Number of parents (NOP) The number of classes that a class directly inherits from (i.e.…”

Fault prediction considering threshold effects of object‐oriented metrics

“…The prediction of quality attributes in early stages of software development will help in effective utilization of resources. There are various software metrics (Chidamber & Kemerer, 1991Li & Henry, 1993;Lorenz & Kidd, 1994;Bieman & Kang, 1995;Lee et al, 1995;Briand et al, 1998Briand et al, , 1999Cartwright & Shepperd, 1999;Aggarwal et al, 2005) that can be used in predicting these quality attributes. Among all the metrics, object-oriented metrics suite given by Chidamber and Kemerer is most widely used in various studies (El Emam et al, 2001;Gyimothy et al, 2005;Cruz & Ochimizu, 2009;Singh et al, 2010;Glasberg et al, 2000).…”