An Empirical Validation Of Code And Design Metrics For Object Oriented Software At Runtime Based On Execution Trace Events

Object-oriented design and development has become popular in today's software development environment. The benefits of object-oriented software development are now widely recognized. Object-oriented development requires not only different approaches to design and implementation; it also requires different approaches to software metrics. Many metrics have been proposed related to various constructs like class, coupling, cohesion, inheritance, information hiding and polymorphism. The metrics for object-oriented systems are different due to the different approach in program paradigm and in object-oriented language itself. Metric data provides quick feedback for software designers and managers. Analyzing and collecting the data can predict design quality. The current research on modeling and measuring the software components through currently available metrics at compile time is insufficient. Traditional coupling measures take into account only "static" measures. They do not account for "dynamic" measures due to polymorphism and may significantly underestimate the complexity of software and misjudge the need for code inspection, testing and debugging. The studies show that dynamic measures also plays vital role in quality measurement.