A practical guide to object-oriented metrics

While there are many ways you can capture your development experiences, metrics can help quantify previous work in a way that can directly guide future efforts. For example, projects of different sizes can require vastly different levels of effort, organizational structure, and management discipline. If you let experience be your guide and understand how a newly proposed system compares to projects you´ve already completed, you have a much better chance of finishing on time and under budget. A wide range of metrics can aid you in managing projects, but here the author focuses on a particular set of product metrics that highlight and quantify a system´s object-oriented (OO) properties. He draws many of the results mentioned here from an analysis of 18 production-level applications built in PowerBuilder-a common GUI tool used for developing client-server database applications on a variety of platforms. (The PowerBuilder metrics analyzer is available free from American Management Systems-http:// www.amsinc.com.) Although these results are derived mainly from PowerBuilder applications, they should still provide practical guidance for development in most OO languages