A Hybrid Set of Complexity Metrics for Large-Scale Object-Oriented Software Systems

Large-scale object-oriented (OO) software systems have recently been found to share global network characteristics such as small world and scale free, which go beyond the scope of traditional software measurement and assessment methodologies. To measure the complexity at various levels of granularity, namely graph, class (and object) and source code, we propose a hierarchical set of metrics in terms of coupling and cohesion — the most important characteristics of software, and analyze a sample of 12 open-source OO software systems to empirically validate the set. Experimental results of the correlations between cross-level metrics indicate that the graph measures of our set complement traditional software metrics well from the viewpoint of network thinking, and provide more effective information about fault-prone classes in practice.