Metrics-Based Evaluation of Object-Oriented Software Development Methods

3 The efficiency of software development (i. e. to produce good software products based on an efficient software process) must be controlled by a quantification of the software development methodologies. The description of object-oriented (OO) methods or comparisons of some of these methods are usually given by a listing of their features. These presentations describe the functionality of a particular development method, but often fail to address quality issues like efficiency, maintainability, portability, maturity etc. The quantification by means of software measurement needs a unified strategy, methodology or approach as one important prerequisite to guarantee the goals of quality assurance, improvement and controlled software management to be achieved. Nowadays, plenty of methods such as measurement frameworks, maturity models, goal-directed paradigms, process languages etc. exist to support this idea. This paper describes an object-oriented approach of a software measurement framework aimed at evaluating OO development methods themselves. It reasons the applicability of metrics-based evaluation as indicator for the quality assurance of the OO development process.