Reliability and maintainability related software coupling metrics
in C++ programs
Intl Symp. on Software Reliability Engineering, page 303--311. (1992)Abstract
A description is given of some difficulties that one encounters in
the testing and maintenance of C++ programs, which may result in
program unreliability. Inheritance and polymorphism are key concepts
in object-oriented programming (OOP), and are essential for achieving
reusability and extendibility, but they also make programs more
difficult to understand. The authors show by arguments and by some
empirical evidence that widely used complexity metrics like lines
of code, cyclomatic complexity, and Software Science's metrics may
not be appropriate to measure the complexity of C++ programs and
those written in other object-oriented languages, since they do
not address concepts like inheritance and encapsulation, apart from
having other weaknesses. Some measures using a notion from the world
of functional decomposition-coupling, are defined for C++ programs.
Two of them-CC and AMC-and equivalent ones for the three widely
used complexity metrics (for comparison) are computed for five C++
programs. Preliminary results show that the coupling measures correlate
better with difficulty of testing and maintenance than the three
widely used complexity metrics
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