Comments on "The Confounding Effect of Class Size on the Validity of Object-Oriented Metrics"

Authors:
William M. Evanco
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Year:
2003

Citing 8
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Abstract

It has been proposed that size should be taken into account as a confounding variable when validating object-oriented metrics. We take issue with this perspective since the ability to measure size does not temporally precede the ability to measure many of the object-oriented metrics that have been proposed. Hence, the condition that a confounding variable must occur causally prior to another explanatory variable is not met. In addition, when specifying multivariate models of defects that incorporate object-oriented metrics, entering size as an explanatory variable may result in misspecifed models that lack internal consistency. Examples are given where this misspecification occurs.