Managerial Use of Metrics for Object-Oriented Software: An Exploratory Analysis

With the increasing use of object-oriented methods in new software development there is a growing need to both document and improve current practice in object-oriented design and development. In response to this need, a number of researchers have developed various metrics for object-oriented systems as proposed aids to the management of these systems. In this research an analysis of a set of metrics proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer [10] is performed in order to assess their usefulness for practicing managers. First, an informal introduction to the metrics is provided by way of an extended example of their managerial use. Second, exploratory analyses of empirical data relating the metrics to productivity, rework effort, and design effort on three commercial object-oriented systems are provided. The empirical results suggest that the metrics provide significant explanatory power for variations in these economic variables, over and above that provided by traditional measures, such as size in lines of code, and after controlling for the effects of individual developers.