Software metrics measure the different aspects of software complexity, thereby providing useful information about the external quality aspects of software like, maintainability, reusability and reliability. This paper discusses the journey of software metrics from traditional to object-oriented paradigm. As the traditional metrics lack behind the object-oriented metrics for a better software system development, the later has become one of the popular concepts in today's software development environment. Object-oriented metrics have been widely-accepted because of the many attributes like simplicity, reusability, time saving, cost-effectiveness and easy maintenance in the software code. The paper also describes how object-oriented technology helps to improve the software quality, system performance and productivity in software development, and compare the traditional paradigm with the object-oriented paradigm.
In
the era of software development, many software organizations have started to introduce
and implement object-oriented technology for software development. Transition
from the traditional approach to the object-oriented technology for software development,
improves the software quality, performance and productivity, as the traditional
approach is not sufficient to build the complex and large software. Traditional
metrics have been applied to the measurement of software complexity of structured
systems since 1976. Different researchers have different opinions regarding the
traditional and object-oriented paradigms. According to Moreau (1987), traditional
metrics are inappropriate for object-oriented systems. However, research conducted
by Tegarden et al., 1992 has shown that a combination of both traditional
and object-oriented metrics may give the best results when analyzing object-oriented
systems with respect to their overall quality. As object-oriented technology has
entered into software organizations, it has opened new challenges for the software
engenderers, researchers and software organizations which used software metrics
as tools for monitoring and maintaining the software products. A wide range of
metrics have been developed to aid the software developer in increasing and measuring
reusability, correctness, maintainability in the code. In order to evaluate the
software, object-oriented software development paradigm requires an altogether
different approach from functional/traditional development techniques, i.e., functional
metrics. Presently, the object-oriented development paradigm is quite commonly
used in the software organizations. Object-oriented development requires not only
a different approach for design and implementation, it requires a different approach
to software metrics. The new object-oriented development methods have their own
terminology to reflect the new structural concepts. An object-oriented system
starts by defining a class that contains related or similar attributes and operations.
The classes are used as the basis for objects. |
