Empirical evaluation of reuse sensitiveness of complexity metrics
Measuring software products and processes is essential for improving software productivity and quality. In order to evaluate the complexity of object-oriented software, several complexity metrics have been proposed. Among them, Chidamber and Kemerers metrics are the most well-known for object-oriented software. Their metrics evaluate the complexity of the classes in terms of internal, inheritance, and coupling complexity. Though the reused classes of the class library usually have better quality than the newly-developed ones, their metrics deal with inheritance and coupling complexity in the same way. This article first proposes a revision of the Chidamber and Kemerers metrics which can be applied to software which had been constructed by reusing software components. Then, we give an analysis of data collected from the development of an object-oriented software using a GUI framework. We compare the original metrics with the revised ones by evaluating the accuracy of estimating the effort to fix faults and show the validity and usefulness of the revised metrics.
reuse complexity metrics framework object-oriented development