Empirical evaluation of reuse sensitiveness of complexity metrics

Measuring software products and processes is essential for improving softwa re productivity and quality. In order to evaluate the complexity of object- oriented software, several complexity metrics have been proposed. Among the m, Chidamber and Kemerer's metrics are the most well-known for object-orien ted software. Their metrics evaluate the complexity of the classes in terms of internal, inheritance, and coupling complexity. Though the reused class es of the class library usually have better quality than the newly-develope d ones, their metrics deal with inheritance and coupling complexity in the same way. This article first proposes a revision of the Chidamber and Kemer er's metrics which can be applied to software which had been constructed by reusing software components. Then, we give an analysis of data collected f rom the development of an object-oriented software using a GUI framework. W e compare the original metrics with the revised ones by evaluating the accu racy of estimating the effort to fix faults and show the validity and usefu lness of the revised metrics. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.