Constructing Relationship between Software Metrics and Code Reusability in Object Oriented Design

The role of the design pattern in the form of software metric and internal code architecture for object-oriented design plays a critical role in software engineering regarding production cost efficiency. This paper discusses code reusability that is a frequently exercised cost saving methodology in IT production. After reviewing existing literature towards a study on software metrics, we found that very few studies are witnessed to incline towards code reusability. Hence, we developed a simple analytical model that establishes a relationship between the design components of standard software metric and code reusability using case studies of three software projects (Customer Relationship Management project, Supply Chain Management project, and Enterprise Relationship Management project). We also testify our proposal using stochastic based Markov model to find that proposed system can extract significant information of maximized values of code reusability with increasing level of uncertainties of software project methodologies.

This empirical study investigates three supply chain transformation projects in Sri Lanka. Building on two previous studies, this study attempts to discern the imperatives and essentials of a successful supply chain transformation project. In essence, this study retrospectively scrutinizes the outcomes of supply chain transformation projects commenced a minimum of 5 years earlier. By juxtaposing the outcomes with longitudinal data from of the said projects, the authors draw unique insights on the dynamics of managing a supply chain transformation project. Additionally, this study outlines critical factors that need to be taken into consideration when implementing supply chain transformation projects. Furthermore, this study improves and outlines the supply chain project management process outlined in previous studies [1]. In sum, this study connects the two growing fields of Supply Chain Management and Project Management in order to posit the importance of expanding the understanding of supply chain project management.

This paper shows that existing software metric tools interpret and implement the definitions of object-oriented software metrics differently. This delivers tool-dependent metrics results and has even implications on the results of analyses based on these metrics results. In short, the metrics-based assessment of a software system and measures taken to improve its design differ considerably from tool to tool. To support our case, we conducted an experiment with a number of commercial and free metrics tools. We calculated metrics values using the same set of standard metrics for three software systems of different sizes. Measurements show that, for the same software system and metrics, the metrics values are tool depended. We also defined a (simple) software quality model for maintainability based on the metrics selected. It defines a ranking of the classes that are most critical wrt. maintainability. Measurements show that even the ranking of classes in a software system is metrics tool dependent.

A Framework for Managing, Measuring, and Predicting Attributes of Software Development Products and Processes Reflecting the immense progress in the development and use of software metrics in the past decades, Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach, Third Edition provides an up-to-date, accessible, and comprehensive introduction to software metrics. Like its popular predecessors, this third edition discusses important issues, explains essential concepts, and offers new approaches for tackling long-standing problems. New to the Third Edition This edition contains new material relevant to object-oriented design, design patterns, model-driven development, and agile development processes. It includes a new chapter on causal models and Bayesian networks and their application to software engineering. This edition also incorporates recent references to the latest software metrics activities, including research results, industrial case studies, and standards. Suitable for a Range of Readers With numerous examples and exercises, this book continues to serve a wide audience. It can be used as a textbook for a software metrics and quality assurance course or as a useful supplement in any software engineering course. Practitioners will appreciate the important results that have previously only appeared in research-oriented publications. Researchers will welcome the material on new results as well as the extensive bibliography of measurement-related information. The book also gives software managers and developers practical guidelines for selecting metrics and planning their use in a measurement program.

The continuing emphasis on improving productivity in the building of software has resulted in clearer definitions of software quality and software engineer productivity, and a greater interest by management and software engineer alike in the tools and measurements that aid in knowing a project is “in control”.This paper describes the software development process used within one software engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation, and the methods and tools used within the group to support the development of software products. Experience in the application of software metrics to parts of the process as a means of quantifying productivity and quality is described.

Object-oriented technology, including object-oriented analysis (OOA), object-oriented design (OOD), and object-oriented programming (OOP), is a new promising approach to developing software systems to reduce software costs and to increase software extensibility, flexibility, and reusability. Software metrics are widely used to measure software complexity and assure software correctness. This paper proposes a metric to measure object-oriented software. Also, an important factor called URIs, is conducted to build the metric. This approach describes a graph-theoretical method for measuring the complexity of the class hierarchy. The proposed metric shows that inheritance has a close relation with object-oriented software complexity and reveals that misuse of repeated (multiple) inheritance will increase software complexity and be prone to implicit software errors. >

A management discipline of software metrics facilitates their consistent measurement and usage during the life cycle of software systems, by maintaining knowledge and data related to their evaluation tasks and application domain knowledge. To investigate environment of the management discipline, we represent software engineering environments by an activity flow model and a micro cycle model. A unified management view of software metrics is established by their collectivity and comprehensiveness in two-dimensional flows of the activity flow model. Then, we propose the Software Quality Manager (SQM) as a realization of the management discipline of software metrics. The proposed software quality manager makes use of two knowledge bases: (1) knowledge about application domain in the form of reusable software components and (2) knowledge about software engineering. The three-stage architecture and preparation process of the proposed system are also presented. Finally, we propose how to support the measurement and analysis task for database management systems within the context of the software quality manager.

Software metrics measure certain properties of the software or its specifications. As quantitative measurements are required in all the sciences, there are ongoing efforts among computer science practitioners and academics to apply analogous approaches to software development process. The main aim is to provide objective, reproducible and quantitative measure that can have many useful applications in such important parts of software project management as the schedule and budget planning, cost estimation, quality assurance, software debugging, performance optimization and optimal staff task assignments as well as in the whole software development life cycle. There exist a number of techniques for modeling software metrics including FPA estimation (mean-based, median-based), LS regression, LMS regression, Neural Networks, and Fuzzy Logic. In this paper we are going to talk about singularities of applying Fuzzy Logic approach to the software metrics modeling.

A fuzzy logic based approach for phase-wise software defects prediction using software metrics

Software metrics serve as a significant issue to improve software quality. It is an important research of software engineering. In line with the methodologies of object-oriented analysis and design widely developed, many software metrics techniques have been proposed. However, not many focus on the metrics evaluation of an inheritance hierarchy. In this paper, we propose a novel concept named unit repeated inheritance (URI) in Z notation to realize object-oriented software metrics. The approach describes an inheritance level technique (ILT) method as a guide to measure the software complexity of an inheritance hierarchy. The measures of inheritance metrics are formed based on the proposed mechanism. Also, we use Lex and Yacc to construct a windowing tool which is used in conjunction with a conventional C++ programming environment to assist a programmer to analyze and measure his/her C++ programs.

Software reuse, share and easy maintenance have long been an important issue in the image processing community. They are crucial to rapid system prototyping, technology transfer, share of software investment and easy system integration with other image processing software. Object-oriented design (OOD) offers excellent facilities for achieving these objectives through inheritance, dynamic binding and encapsulation. The authors present experiences in applying object-oriented design to two image processing examples. They demonstrate that the use of object-oriented software design can achieve efficiency in software reuse, maintenance and software integration.

The construction and maintenance of large, high-quality software projects is a complex, error-prone and difficult process. Tools employing software database metrics can play an important role in the efficient execution and management of such large projects. In this paper, we present a generic framework to address this problem. This framework incorporates database and knowledge-base tools, a formal set of software test and evaluation metrics, and a suite of advanced analytic techniques for extracting information and knowledge from available data. The proposed combination of critical metrics and analytic tools can enable highly efficient and cost-effective management of large and complex software projects. The framework has the potential for greatly reducing venture risks and enhancing production quality in the domain of large-scale software project management.

Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) provides a way to create a new Component Based Software System (CBSS) by utilizing the existing components. The primary reason for that is to minimize the software development time, cost and effort. CBSS also increases the component reusability. Due to these advantages, software industries are working on CBSS and continuously trying to provide quality product. Usability is one of the major quality factors for CBSS. It should be measured before delivering the software product to the customer, so that if there are any usability flaws, it can be removed by software development team. In this paper, work has been done to evaluate the usability of CBSS based on major usability sub-factors (learnability, operability, understandability and configurability). For this purpose, firstly software metrics are identified for each usability sub-factor and the value of each sub-factor is evaluated for a component based software project. Secondly, overall usability of the software project is evaluated by using the calculated value of each usability sub-factor. Usability for the same project was also evaluated using Fuzzy approach in MATLAB to validate the experimental work of this research paper. It was identified that the value of usability obtained from software metrics and fuzzy model was very similar. This research work will be useful for the software developer to evaluate the usability of any CBSS and will also help them to compare different version of any CBSS in term of their usability.

Software metrics should support managerial decision making in software projects. We explain how traditional metrics approaches, such as regression-based models for cost estimation fall short of this goal. Instead, we describe a causal model (using a Bayesian network) which incorporates empirical data, but allows it to be interpreted and supplemented using expert judgement. We show how this causal model is used in a practical decision-support tool, allowing a project manager to trade-off the resources used against the outputs (delivered functionality, quality achieved) in a software project. The model and toolset have evolved in a number of collaborative projects and hence capture significant commercial input. Extensive validation trials are taking place among partners on the EC funded project MODIST (this includes Philips, Israel Aircraft Industries and QinetiQ) and the feedback so far has been very good. The estimates are sensible and the causal modelling approach enables decision-makers to reason in a way that is not possible with other project management and resource estimation tools. To ensure wide dissemination and validation a version of the toolset with the full underlying model is being made available for free to researchers.

This challenges and open problems paper discusses the role of software engineers when combining modeling with Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE). With SBSE techniques increasingly providing insights into difficult software modeling problems, the role of the software engineer might be thought of as diminishing. However, given the crucial role of the model understanding in SBSE, we argue that the role of the software engineer will become more important through interactive SBSE, although exploiting this interaction remains a challenge for the field.