Decomposition of inheritance hierarchy DAGs for object-oriented software metrics

Authors:
Timothy K. Shih;Chi-Ming Chung;Chun-Chia Wang;Wen C. Pai
Affiliations:
Dept. of CS and IE, Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.;Dept. of CS and IE, Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.;Dept. of CS and IE, Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.;Dept. of Information Management, Kuang Wu Institute of Technology and Commerce, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Venue:
ECBS'97 Proceedings of the 1997 international conference on Engineering of computer-based systems
Year:
1997

Citing 6
Cited 0

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Abstract

Software metrics are widely used to measure software complexity and assure software quality. However, research in the field of the software complexity measurement of a class hierarchy has not yet been carefully studied. In this paper, we introduce a novel factor named unit repeated inheritance (URI) and an important method named inheritance level technique (ILT) to realize and measure the object-oriented software complexity of a class hierarchy. The approach is based on the graph-theoretical model for measuring the hierarchical complexity in inheritance relations. The proposed metrics extraction shows that inheritance has a close relation to the object-oriented software measurement and reveals that overuse of the repeated (multiple) inheritance will increase software complexity and be prone to implicit software errors.