An evaluation of code metrics for object-oriented programs

This paper reports on the preliminary results of an investigation into the quality of programs written using different programming paradigms. In particular, the project aims to provide a quantitative analysis of the object-oriented and functional paradigms. Here, we report on the first stage of the project, the evaluation of a number of suggested indicators to determine whether or not they are correlated with the quality of object-oriented programs. Quality is assumed to be measured by the number of known errors encountered and the number of modification requests made during development, testing and maintenance, the times taken to attend to these and a subjective assessment of program complexity. We found that two of the suggested code metrics (the number of non-comment source lines and the number of function declarations) were strongly correlated with these measures of quality.