Object oriented design metrics and tools a survey

The most important measure that must be considered in any software product is its design quality. The design phase takes only 5-10 % of the total effort but a large part (up to 80%) of total effort goes into correcting bad design decisions. If bad design is not fixed, the cost for fixing it after software delivery is between 5 and 100 times or higher. Researches on object oriented design metrics have produced a large number of metrics that can be measured to identify design problems and assess design quality attributes. However the use of these design metrics is limited in practice due to the difficulty of measuring and using a large number of metrics. This paper presents a survey of object-oriented design metrics. The goal of this paper is to identify a limited set of metrics that have significant impact on design quality attributes. We adopt the notion of defining design metrics as independent variables that can be measured to assess their impact on design quality attributes as dependent variables. We also present survey of existing object oriented design metrics tools that can be used to automate the measurement process. We present our conclusions on the set of important object oriented design metrics that can be assessed using these tools.