Foundations for Defining Software Metrics
Rüdiger Lincke, Welf Löwe · 2006
Ambiguous metric definitions lead to incomparable implementation variants in tools. In this paper, we propose an unambiguous description framework for software metrics, which includes an extensible meta-model and language mapping definitions. We start from the Dagstuhl Middle Metamodel (DMM), an existing and well-defined metamodel for reverse engineering. As examples, we define some software quality metrics based on this meta-model, as well as language mappings for Java and UML/XMI. Meta-models, language mappings, and metrics have been implemented using the definitions with our description framework as the specification basis. We suggest that our description framework eliminates existing ambiguities in software metric definitions, simplifying the implementation of metrics in their original sense, an allowing for the definition of standardized metrics.