A Metamodel for the Measurement of Object-Oriented Systems: An Analysis using Alloy

This paper presents a MOF-compliant metamodel for calculating software metrics and demonstrates how it is used to generate a metrics tool that calculates coupling and cohesion metrics. We also describe a systematic approach to the analysis of MOF-compliant metamodels and illustrate the approach using the presented metamodel. In this approach, we express the metamodel using UML and OCL and harness existing automated tools in a framework that generates a Java implementation and an Alloy specification of the metamodel, and use this both to examine the metamodel constraints, and to generate instantiations of the metamodel. Moreover, we describe how the approach can be used to generate test data for any software based on a MOF-compliant metamodel. We extend our framework to support this approach and use it to generate a test suite for the metrics calculation tool that is based on our metamodel.