Software Design Metrics for Object-Oriented Software

The importance of software measurement is increasing leading to development of new measurement techniques. As the development of object-oriented software is rising, more and more metrics are being defined for object-oriented languages. Many metrics have been proposed related to various object-oriented constructs like class, coupling, cohesion, inheritance, information hiding and polymorphism. The applicability of metrics developed by previous researchers is mostly limited to requirement, design and implementation phase. Exception handling is a desirable feature of software that leads to robust design and must be measured. This research addresses this need and introduces a new set of design metrics for object-oriented code. Two metrics are developed that measure the amount of robustness included in the code. The metrics are analytically evaluated against Weyuker’s proposed set of nine axioms. These set of metrics are calculated and analyzed for standard projects and accordingly ways in which project managers can utilize these metrics are suggested.