The size of SW artifacts is universally recognized as one of the most relevant metrics needed to support important software engineering and management practices, such as cost estimation, defect density estimation for test planning, etc. Traditionally, Lines Of Code (LOCs) and Function Points (FPs) have been used –often successfully– to characterize the physical and functional size, respectively, of software coded in languages like C, COBOL, or Ada. Since object-oriented (OO) programming became a popular development practice, researchers and practitioners have defined several techniques aimed at measuring object-oriented software. Under several respects, OO metrics have not yet fully proven their validity. Model-Driven Development requires that suitable model metrics be defined in order to characterize the size of models, since it is expected that several features of the resulting code can be estimated on the basis of the model’s quantitative characteristics. In this paper we report some experimental evaluations of metrics for OO models. Such metrics were obtained by adapting for OO models some metrics that ware originally conceived for OO code. According to the reported results, we sketch a methodological approach to the measurement of model size and other quantitative characteristics.
Object-Oriented Model Size Measurement: Experiences and a Proposal for a Process
LAVAZZA, LUIGI ANTONIO
2006-01-01
Abstract
The size of SW artifacts is universally recognized as one of the most relevant metrics needed to support important software engineering and management practices, such as cost estimation, defect density estimation for test planning, etc. Traditionally, Lines Of Code (LOCs) and Function Points (FPs) have been used –often successfully– to characterize the physical and functional size, respectively, of software coded in languages like C, COBOL, or Ada. Since object-oriented (OO) programming became a popular development practice, researchers and practitioners have defined several techniques aimed at measuring object-oriented software. Under several respects, OO metrics have not yet fully proven their validity. Model-Driven Development requires that suitable model metrics be defined in order to characterize the size of models, since it is expected that several features of the resulting code can be estimated on the basis of the model’s quantitative characteristics. In this paper we report some experimental evaluations of metrics for OO models. Such metrics were obtained by adapting for OO models some metrics that ware originally conceived for OO code. According to the reported results, we sketch a methodological approach to the measurement of model size and other quantitative characteristics.
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