A new metrics set for evaluating testing efforts for object-oriented programs

Software metrics proposed and used for procedural paradigm have been found inadequate for object oriented software products, mainly because of the distinguishing features of the object oriented paradigm such as inheritance and polymorphism. Several object oriented software metrics have been described in the literature. These metrics are goal driven in the sense that they are targeted towards specific software qualities. We propose a new set of metrics for object oriented programs; this set is targeted towards estimating the testing efforts for these programs. The definitions of these metrics are based on the concepts of object orientation and hence are independent of the object oriented programming languages. The new metrics set has been critically compared with three other metrics sets published in the literature.