A Network of Object-Oriented Software Metrics’ Parameters

The use of software metrics has become a crucial tool during the software design phase. The quality of software design can be measured using these metrics. Therefore, it is important to understand software metrics in a way that makes it wiser to select a particular metric in the software design assessment process. To calculate the value of a metric, it is needed to have its parameters involved. Hence, each metric consists of one or several parameters. Many of the object-oriented metrics have parameters in common. This means a parameter can be associated with several metrics. In this case, understanding the relations among parameters may help developers when selecting metrics during the software design phase, which makes the assessment process accurate, wiser, and reduce time consumption. In this work, we deeply investigate the relations among object-oriented metrics’ parameters using concepts inspired from complex networks. The dataset used in this paper was collected from trusted and accredited resources in Software Engineering field. The dataset contains the main 104 object-oriented metrics and their parameters. The results showed important facts about the relations among metrics’ parameters. We believe that this is the first kind of work that investigates the relations among object-oriented metrics’ parameters.