Object-Oriented Metrics In Practice

Michele Lanza, Radu Marinescu, Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice, Springer Verlag, ISBN 3540244298/978-3540244295, 2006 (republished in 2010).

About the book

Metrics are paramount in every engineering discipline. Software engineering, however, is not considered a classical engineering activity for several reasons. In general, if a software system is seen to deliver the required functionality, only few people if any care about the internals. Moreover, defining, understanding and applying software metrics often looks like an overly complex activity, recommended only to 'trained professionals'.

Lanza and Marinescu demystify the design metrics used to assess the size, quality and complexity of object-oriented software systems. Based on statistical information from many industrial projects and generally accepted semantics they deduce many single and combined threshold values. They show in detail how to identify collaboration and classification disharmony patterns in code, how to visualize their results using the freely available CodeCrawler visualization tool, and how to devise possible remedies.

The combination of theoretically sound results and practically tested procedures and solution paths makes this book an ideal companion for professional software architects, developers and quality engineers. The pattern-oriented description of disharmonies offers easy access to detecting shortcomings and applying solution strategies.

About the authors

Michele Lanza is Professor at University of Lugano, Switzerland.
Radu Marinescu is Professor at Politehnica University of Timisoara, Roamania.