Overview of software engineering metrics for procedural paradigm

Software engineering is defined as an establishment and use of sound engineering principles in order to obtain timely developed software that is reliable and works efficiently on real machines. To qualitatively and quantitatively measure various aspects of software, software metrics are used. Many researchers have proposed and used various software metrics since 1970s. This paper gives an insight to these metrics focusing majorly on software product metrics. Software product metrics can further be classified as being procedural or not. This paper highlights the various aspects of the procedural metrics like their advent over various years, whether a paper proposing a metric has also proposed a software testing technique for which that metric is applicable, whether the metrics proposed in the relevant studies have been validated or not etc. Astonishingly, not even a single tool could be found available for these metrics. This renders other researchers taking advantages of the already existing metrics. It was observed that after the year 1990, the building inclination for procedural metrics almost stalled. The current research yielded that there is still a lot of scope in reexamining the validity of various procedural metric by applying on some standard data.