A non-invasive approach to product metrics collection

Software metrics are useful means in helping software engineers to develop large and complex software systems. In the past years, many software metrics have been proposed in order to represent several different concepts such as complexity, coupling, inheritance, reuse, etc. However, this requires the collection of large volumes of metrics and, without flexible and transparent tools, is nearly impossible to collect data accurately. This paper presents the design and the implementation of a tool for collecting and analyzing product metrics in a non-invasive way. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.