Evaluating the Effect of Inheritance on the Characteristics of Object Oriented Programs

Abstract

This paper considers a fact that software measures, which many of them were defined many years ago, are still not widely used in software industry, and therefore some additional insights will be gained by investigating Halstead's metrics and use them to propose more software metrics. Since the object oriented approach was considered an active technology for achieving high quality software, three metrics for evaluating the extent to which the inheritance property was invested in the object oriented programs are proposed in this paper. The first proposed metric was "the inheritance ratio" which studies the reduction in the program volume as a result of using the inheritance property with respect to the volume of the same program when it was written as functional oriented. The second metric "the inheritance level" points at the reduction achieved in program volume when the inheritance property was implemented in different levels. The third metric "effort ratio" relates to the reduction in developer's effort during the process of program development.