Properties of software measures

During recent years much attention has been directed towards the measurement of the properties and the complexity of software. The major goal of using software measures is to get reliable software and an objective representation of the properties of software and the software development process by numbers. Many software measures have been developed in order to determine the static complexity of single programs (intra-modular complexity) and of entire software systems (inter-modular complexity) during the phases of the software lifecycle. As a consequence of these developments many authors have discussed the properties of software measures. In this paper a measurement theory is introduced which gives conditions for the properties of measures. The properties of software measures and conditions of the use of software measures as an ordinal and ratio scale are given. As an example, these are applied to the measures of McCabe.Because composition and decomposition operations are major strategies in software development, theorems which describe the properties of software measures related to this type of operations are also presented. Properties of software measures, as required by masses in the literature, are discussed and explained with statements of measurement theory. The results show that it is possible to explain most of the required properties of software measures in the literature with conditions of measurement theory. This makes the properties of software measures during the software lifecycle and their application in practice more visible.

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