Empirical Analysis of Object-Oriented Design Metrics:Towards a New Metric Using Control Flow Paths and Probabilities.
Mourad Badri, Linda N. Badri, Fadel Touré · The Journal of Object Technology · 2009
A large number of object-oriented metrics have been proposed in literature.They are used to assess different software attributes.However, it is not obvious for a developer or a project manager to select the metrics that are more useful.Furthermore, these metrics are not completely independent.Using several metrics at the same time is time consuming and can generate a quite large data set, which may be difficult to analyze and interpret.We present, in this paper, a new metric capturing in a unified way several aspects of object-oriented systems quality.The metric uses control flow paths and probabilities, and captures the collaboration between classes.Our objective is not to evaluate a given design by giving absolute values, but more relative values that may be used, for example, to identify in a relative way high-risk classes.We have designed and conducted an empirical study using several large Java projects.We compared the new metric, using the Principal Components Analysis method, to several well known object-oriented metrics.The selected metrics were grouped in five categories: coupling, cohesion, inheritance, complexity and size.The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed metric captures, in a large part, the information provided by the other metrics.