UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI Code and Design Metrics for ObjectOriented Systems.pdf

Code and Design Metrics for Object-Oriented Systems Jaana Lindroos Helsinki, 1st of December 2004 Seminar on Quality Models for Software Engineering Department of Computer Science UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI Code and Design Metrics for Object-Oriented Systems Jaana Lindroos Seminar on Quality Models for Software Engineering Department of Computer Science UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI 1st of December 2004, 10 pages Abstract Object-oriented design and development has become popular in today’s software development environment. The benefits of object-oriented software development are now widely recognized. Object-oriented development requires not only different approaches to design and implementation; it also requires different approaches to software metrics. The metrics for object-oriented systems are different due to the different approach in program paradigm and in object-oriented language itself. An object-oriented program paradigm uses localization, encapsulation, information hiding, inheritance, object abstraction and polymorphism, and has different program structure than in procedural languages. There are quite a few sets of proposed metrics of object-oriented metrics for object-oriented software in the literature and research papers. The definition of six different metrics is presented in this document. The presented metrics are also validated by couple of real projects that use object-oriented language in their projects. Metric data provides quick feedback for software designers and managers. Analyzing and collecting the data can predict design quality. If appropriately used, it can lead to a significant reduction in costs of the overall implementation and improvements in quality of the final product. The improved quality, in