Implementation of a Measurement Tool for Object Oriented Software and Research on Measure Experiments
Xin Li · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2000
Software metrics is an important branch of software engineering. First this paper introduces a metrics suite suggested by R Chidamber and F Kemerer for object-oriented design, analyses its shortcoming, and provides an improved metrics. Then the paper describes a practical software measurement tool, SMTCPP, developed by authors. The design of SMTCPP is based on the improved metrics and the tool is for measure of C++ programs. SMTCPP makes parse to C++ programs by LL(1) method, extracts information about classes, members, and objects, counts out the indications such as methods per class, the biggest complexity among methods, depth of inheritance tree, number of children, coupling between object classes, response for class, and relative lack of cohesion in methods. The measure values are very useful to guide software process. The tool may also put the values into database to collect sufficient data for building software quality evaluation model. Last, the paper analyses the experiments for three practical programs. The result shows SMTCPP is useful.