An empirical study of certain object-oriented software metrics

Abstract This research focuses on analyzing certain software metrics in an object-oriented (OO) environment. The metrics collected and analyzed includes size, number of message (NOM) sends, reuse, inherited methods, and hierarchical nesting level. The site used is the factory systems department of a large manufacturing company. This department uses SmallTalk as the OO programming language to implement the OO design paradigm. Using automated tools developed in SmallTalk, these metrics were collected from three domain applications comprising 600 classes. Four propositions are empirically tested and the results provided in this study.