New Design Metrics for Complexity Estimation in Object Oriented Systems

This paper proposes four design metrics of class level for early and effective feedback to manage the quality of object-oriented software. These metrics measure the complexity induced by the use of various object-oriented design concepts like data hiding, aggregation, inheritance and cohesion. These four metrics are evaluated from the output of design phase before the starting of the coding to reduce the overall efforts in term of time, cost, and manpower. Although various set of metrics already exist to measure the design complexity of class and objectoriented system but maximum of them are evaluated from the source code not before actual coding. These measures are analytically evaluated against Weyuker’s properties for object-oriented metrics. Metrics data is collected from two C++ projects as empirical sample for analysis.