High Level Design Quality Assessment of Object Oriented Codes

This paper proposes an improved Object Oriented metrics, which may be used for the high-level design quality assessment of Object Oriented software. An integrated approach has been adopted to get a single class based metrics that may be used for cumulative measure of all aspects of object oriented design (encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism), and hence an indication of quality of class in terms of complexity. These values of WCC (Weighted Class Complexity) when averaged will enable computing the average complexity of software and also the quality. Three principle steps, identification of product attributes, identification of quality factors and a means of linkage, has been followed to develop such a metric. The proposed metric has been theoretically and empirically validated. This single metric may be used in initial stages and ensuring compliance at this stage will increase the reliability of system as a whole, as reliability in general is a by-product of quality.