An Empirical Assessment of Function Point-Like Object-Oriented Metrics

Since object-oriented programming became a popular development practice, researchers and practitioners have defined several techniques aimed at measuring object-oriented software. Among these, several Function Point-like approaches have been proposed. However, mapping the concepts at the basis of Function Point Analysis onto object-oriented concepts is not straightforward; therefore, there is the need to test the validity of FP-based object-oriented metrics. This paper presents an analysis of a set of programs developed by master students of a software engineering course employing object-oriented techniques (UML and Java). Different kinds of FP-based object-oriented metrics were applied, and the results analysed. The work done addresses questions like the following: is there a correlation between object-oriented FPs and LOCs? How do object-oriented FPs compare with the function points defined by Albrecht? How do object-oriented FPs compare with non FP-like OO metrics? How do object-oriented FPs compare with each other?