Dynamic inheritance coupling metric-design and analysis for assessing reusability

Abstract

Moving along the different phases of software development life cycle measuring the quality of software has always been a challenging task but is considered immensely useful. The area of software metrics, especially pertaining to object-oriented software system, has expertise in describing the characteristics of a software system for the past few decades. Software metrics numerically extract relationships among given components in a software system and relate those measurements to the system’s quality. Thus, software metrics predict the current level of software quality and in turn initiate a feedback process that may lead to further improvement of a software system. But the actual behaviour of the software can only be measured from information collected at runtime. Thus, there is a need of evolving such software metrics that are based on the runtime analysis of a software system. These metrics are known as dynamic metrics. In this paper, new dynamic coupling and inheritance metrics for object-oriented systems is designed and validated on a metric tool developed in Java measuring inheritance coupling, complexity, class independent factor and relating the calculated measures to a software quality attribute-reusability which is useful in software quality assessment.