An object-oriented metrics suite for Ada 95

Abstract

Ada 95 added object-oriented programming capabilities to the existing Ada standard. The object-oriented paradigm results in new relationships within and among software modules. Traditional software product metrics, i.e., those metrics developed for functionally oriented software, do not account for these new relationships and may be insufficient for use in object-oriented development. This paper addresses this deficiency by 1) defining a set of object-oriented metrics tailored to Ada 95 software, and 2) providing empirical evidence of their validity. This set of metrics includes product measures quantifying the class-related software attributes of size, coupling, cohesion, and complexity. The results indicate that many of the metrics examined do correlate to the number of revisions made to the classes during development.