Validation of CK Metrics for Object Oriented Design Measurement

Since object oriented system is becoming more pervasive, it is necessary that software engineers have quantitative measurements for accessing the quality of designs at both the architectural and components level. These measures allow the designer to access the software early in the process, making changes that will reduce complexity and improve the continuing capability of the product. Object oriented design metrics is an essential part of software engineering. This paper presents a case study of applying design measures to assess software quality. Six Java based open source software systems are analyzed using CK metrics suite to find out quality of the system and possible design faults that will reversely affect different quality parameters such as reusability, understandability, testability, maintainability. This paper also presents general guidelines for interpretation of reusability, understandability, testability, maintainability in the context of selected projects.