The Assignment of Scale to Object-Oriented Software Measures
Ralph D. Neal, Heinz Roland Weistroffer, Richard J. Coppins · 1997
In order to improve productivity (and quality), measurement of specific aspects of software has become imperative. As object oriented programming languages have become more widely used, metrics designed specifically for object-oriented software are required. Recently a large number of new metrics for objectoriented software has appeared in the literature. Unfortunately, many of these proposed metrics have not been validated to measure what they purport to measure. In this paper fifty (50) of these metrics are analyzed. 1 1. Introduction Software development historically has been the arena of the artist. Artistically developed code often resulted in arcane algorithms or spaghetti code that was unintelligible to those who had to perform maintenance (or make it work in the first place). Initially only very primitive measures such as lines of code (LOC) and development time per stage of the development life cycle were collected. Projects often exceeded estimated time and budget. In ...