A Measurement Tool for Object Oriented Software and Measurement Experiments with It

Abstract

The research on software metrics has a long history for more than forty years, but the research on object-oriented (OO) software metrics has been going on for a few years only. C&K metrics is one of the most famous researches on OO software metrics. First, this paper analyses the shortcoming of the C&K metrics suite for object-oriented design and provides an improved metrics suite. Then the paper introduces a practical C++ measurement tool, SMTCPP, implemented by the authors based on improved metrics. SMTCPP parses C++ programs by the LL(1) method, extracts a lot of program information, such as classes, members and objects; counts the indications, such as the number of methods per class, the biggest complexity among methods, depth of inheritance tree, the 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 the software process. The tool may also put the values into a database to collect sufficient data for building a software quality evaluation model. Last, the paper analyses the experiments for three practical programs. The result shows that SMTCPP is useful.