An Object Oriented Runtime Complexity Metric based on Iterative Decision Points

Software metrics are used to measure the quality of a software system. Such metrics indicate the level of desired quality present in a system. However software metrics have traditionally been captured at compile time, rendering useful results, but often times inexact, as the complete source code differs from the executing subset. For this reason, static metrics can fall short of measuring the true operational behavior of object oriented programs. In this paper, we present an investigation into the runtime boundary behavior of Rhino 1.7R4 – an open source implementation of JavaScript, in which we introduce a new runtime metric that measures the quality of complexity based on iterative decision points. We call this the “runtime boundary” as we are instead measuring object oriented quality at runtime; normal performance metrics collected at runtime are typically neither object oriented nor focused on quality. Finally, we validate the metric by comparing it to bug data.