A novel approach to formalize Object-Oriented Design Metrics

Despite the extensive and solid research literature on Object-Oriented Design Metrics (OOD Metrics), a recent survey that was conducted to assess the exploitation of metrics collection and analysis in the design phase within the software industry in Sweden [1], indicated that only 21% of the survey respondents collect metrics in the design phase. 55% of the respondents to the same survey said that they consider metrics collection as a difficult process. A major reason of the difficulty of collecting design metrics is the lack of a common syntax or a common language to express OOD metrics. This lack resulted in shortage of tools that automate collecting design metrics. Researchers who propose OOD metrics express them in plain English or as mathematical formulas. Plain English allows different interpretations for the same metric. Mathematical formulas should be based on a mathematical model, which does not exist for ObjectOriented designs. In this paper, we propose expressing metrics as XQuery expressions that targets XMI documents. XMI documents offer a standard way for representing object-oriented designs, specifically UML diagrams. Also, we present Design-Metrics Crawler, which is a software tool that applies our proposal.