A Metric for Evaluating Effectiveness of Object-Oriented Interface Abstraction for Promoting Software Reuse

A metric is proposed for measuring the effectiveness of object-oriented interface abstraction for controlling the reuse of software in individual object-oriented programs. Object-oriented languages permit flexible design of software component interfaces through class, inheritance, and polymorphism. To reliably measure the effectiveness of the effort spent on abstraction on software reuse, we need to estimate the effectiveness program by program. The proposed method measures the effort and effectiveness, and derives from the relation between them a metric for evaluating how effectively interface abstraction promotes software reuse in individual object-oriented programs. Application to different versions of class library Interviews shows that the results of the metric measurement agree with the analysis of the user manuals in that the metric value decreases immediately after refinement of class hierarchy and increases in the stage of functional extension after refinement of the class hierarchy.