Towards a catalog of Object-Oriented Software Maintainability metrics

A high number of metrics have been used to measure Object-Oriented Software Maintainability (OOSM). However, there is no comprehensive and useful catalog showing which metrics are more appropriated for adoption in OOSM assessment in both, academic and industrial environments. In a previous work we performed a systematic mapping study to identify maintainability metrics resulting in 570 OOSM metrics found. We classified those metrics in 15 domain categories to help us on the catalog building process. This categorization will be the basement of our inclusion/exclusion criteria when we select which metrics will compose a catalog. Using the proposed categorization we believe that we can select the most relevant and/or popular OOSM metrics. In this position paper we discuss a range of options of OOSM metrics categorization, making the OOSM metrics catalog building process accurate and reliable. Such options include how to evaluate them by the academic and practitioner points of view. We also expect that such discussion during the workshop can help us to identify other options to both propose a more useful catalog and to perform its evaluation.