Impact of Inheritance on Metrics for Size, Coupling, and Cohesion in Object-Oriented Systems

In today’s engineering of object oriented systems many different metrics are used to get feedback about design quality and to automatically identify design weaknesses. While the concept of inheritance is covered by special inheritance metrics its impact on other classical metrics (like size, coupling or cohesion metrics) is not considered; this can yield misleading measurement values and false interpretations. In this paper we present an approach to work the concept of inheritance into classical metrics (and with it the related concepts of overriding, overloading and polymorphism). This is done by some language dependent flattening functions that modify the data on which the measurement will be done. These functions are implemented within our metrics tool Crocodile and are applied for a case study: the comparison of the measurement values of the original data with the measurement values of the flattened data yields interesting results and improves the power of classical measurements for interpretation.