Measurement of Software Engineering Practices

Abstract

The software measurement has proven to be an effective tool in helping the software managers to understand, control, and improve various characteristics of the software newlineprocess and product. Software measurement also helps to identify risks, assess their impact on cost and schedule, and to select the best approach for solving the problems. newlineTwo most common approaches used for development of the software are procedure-oriented approach and object-oriented approach. This thesis presents few measurement newlinetechniques for both kinds of software. newlineThe thesis presents an integrated measure of software complexity, which integrates newlineeffects of four different complexity metrics with the help of fuzzy logic. A new technique newlineof the rule base representation for the fuzzy models has been proposed in order to newlineimprove the efficiency. The thesis also presents a new formula for measuring the newlineweakness of a program, which takes care of coupling among the modules along with the newlineweaknesses of individual modules. The complexity of object-oriented software has also newlinebeen measured in this thesis by unifying the intra-class complexity and inter-class newlinecomplexity and the proposed metric has been evaluated axiomatically. newlineIn order to comprehend the working of a software, spatial abilities of the programmers newlineplay an important role. The thesis presents new metrics for measuring spatial complexity of procedure-oriented software as well as object-oriented software. This thesis also newlinepresents a model for cost estimation, which is able to take care of some ambiguities present in the initial stages of the software. The concept of dynamic metrics has also been newlinecovered in this thesis. Finally, the thesis proposes new metrics of maintainability of procedure-oriented software and object-oriented software, which integrate the effect of newlinecomplexity, readability, and quality of source-code and related documents.