An emprical analysis of early object oriented design metrics in relation to code size

Abstract

Aim of this study is to investigate metrics that can be obtained from early object oriented designs and show empirically their effect on lines of code of the resulting software. For this purpose, by conducting a literature review a set of OO metrics are identified including metrics in MOOD suite, QMOOD Suite, Martin Suite and CK suite and other metric survey studies. By analyzing metric definition and their calculation processes, we have selected a subset of them which do not overlap and could be obtained in the early design phase. Eclipse metric plug-in was used to obtain OO design metrics for 252 packages. Then relationships between the metrics are shown and a model for code size prediction is presented.