On the Definition of Dynamic Software Measures

The quantification of several software attributes (e.g., size, complexity, cohesion, coupling) is usually carried out in a static fashion, and several hundreds of measures have been defined to this end. However, static measurement may only be an approximation for the measurement of these attributes during software use. The paper proposes a theoretical frame- work based on Axiomatic Approaches for the definition of sensible dynamic software measures that can dynamically capture these attributes. Dynamic measures based on this framework are defined for dynamically quantifying size and coupling. In this paper, we also compare dynamic measures of size and coupling against well-known static measures by correlating them with fault-pronenesses of four case studies.