Monitoring the evolution of an OO system with metrics: an experience from the stock market software domain

This article reports on the experience of monitoring the evolution of a product family of financial Web service software system with OO-metrics over a period of three years. Every four to six months, a snapshot of the system was taken and a set of OO metrics was computed. The classes with extreme metric values or important value changes became the focus of analysis and discussions among the developers, designers, and managers. This way, potential problems were identified and corrected early.