Inheritance Metrics: What do they Measure?

摘要

Characteristics of inheritance metrics are compared with size and length measurement using the property based validation framework of Briand et al. About a dozen inheritance metrics are analyzed and compared with some known object oriented metrics. The analysis first performs an identification of viewpoints and projections of the chosen metrics in order to meaningfully apply the property based framework. For the purpose of this analysis, nested and internal projections are also newly suggested in this paper. The work results in associating most of the chosen inheritance metrics with either the size or the length aspect, while two metrics remain unclassified.