Applicability of Weyuker Property 9 to Object-Oriented Inheritance Tree Metric-A Discussion

Abstract

In the metric suite for object-oriented design put forward by Chidamber and Kemerer(C&K) (1994), it is observed that Weyuker property 9 (1998) is not satisfied by any of the structural inheritance complexity metrics. The same is also observed for candidate structural inheritance complexity metric by Brito and Carapuca (1994) and on the applicability of Weyuker property 9 to object-oriented structural inheritance complexity metrics by Gursaran and Roy (2001). In this paper we present a new inheritance tree metric (ITM) which satisfies the Weyuker property 9 (interaction increases complexity) i.e. when two classes are combined, the interaction between classes can increase the complexity of ITM value. Examples supporting the applicability of the property are also presented.