An Empirical Analysis of Object-Oriented Metrics for Java Technologies

As a fact, the application of object-oriented approach is of high significance in the area of software development since it can abet efficiency or cost effectiveness and reduce error probability during software design and implementation. In order to quantify, especially qualitative aspects such as potential error hot spots caused by elevated design complexity, software measurement can strongly assist. Particularly, metrics proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer as well as Abreu´s MOOD metrics set are presumably most prevalent in practice and provide adequate explanatory power. Especially the object-oriented programming language Java cannot be dismissed from one´s thoughts because a lot of Java libraries serve as foundation for contemporary applications. Thus, after initially defining language bindings for the aforementioned metrics, we perform measurement and evaluation of various Java standard libraries like J2SE, J2EE, J2ME, JWSDP and few others concerning different aspects. The results acquired are beneficial to be used by software designers for aligning and orienting their design with common industry practices. Furthermore, our extensive measurements enable us to carry out key metrics correlation studies incorporating many thousand Java classes