A tool for automatically gathering object-oriented metrics

Measuring software and the software development process are essential for organizations attempting to improve their software processes. For organizations using the object-oriented development approach, traditional metrics and metric gathering tools meant for procedural and structured software development are typically not meaningful. Chidamber and Kemerer proposed a suite of metrics for object-oriented design based upon measurement theory and guided by the insights of experienced object-oriented software developers. This paper presents the implementation of a tool to gather a subset of these proposed metrics for an object oriented software development project. Software metrics can be gathered at many levels of granularity; this tool provides measurements at two levels: class-level and system-level. Class-level metrics measure the complexity of individual classes contained in the system. These metrics can be very useful for predicting defect rates and estimating cost and schedule of future development projects. Examples of class-level metrics are depth of inheritance tree and class coupling. System-level metrics deal with a collection of classes that comprise an object-oriented system. Number of class clusters and number of class hierarchies are two examples of system-level metrics. The tool was written in C++ and currently only supports C++ software measurement. The authors plan to add the capability to measure software written in other object-oriented languages in the near future