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Information and Software Technology
Volume 46, Issue 10, August 2004, Pages 689-699
 
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doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2004.01.001    How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)
Copyright © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Measurement of object-oriented software spatial complexity

Jitender Kumar ChhabraCorresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author, a, K. K. AggarwalE-mail The Corresponding Author, b and Yogesh SinghE-mail The Corresponding Author, c

a Department of Computer Engineering, National Institute of Technology, (formerly REC), Kurukshetra 136119, India b GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi 110006, India c School of Information Technology, GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi 110006, India

Received 24 April 2003. 
Available online 20 February 2004.

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Abstract

One of the important activities of the maintenance phase is to understand the source-code first, and then change it. Understandability of the software gets affected by psychological complexity of the source-code and cognitive abilities are needed to understand it. The correlation between the orientation and location of various entities with their processing needs to be established by the programmers, which requires spatial abilities. These spatial abilities play an important role in object-oriented software, in which the use of data as well as the methods of the class needs to be understood in a combined way. This paper presents two measures of spatial complexity of object-oriented software, which are based on definition and usage of classes and objects. The values of proposed measures get affected suitably because of inheritance and polymorphism as well, due to change in the distances. The significance of object-oriented spatial complexity has been demonstrated with the help of 15 object-oriented projects of varied length and results have been validated with the help of reverse engineering data and perfective maintenance data.

Author Keywords: Object-oriented software; Software metrics; Understandability; Spatial complexity; Psychological complexity

Article Outline

1. Need of measurement
2. Source-code understandability of object-oriented software
3. Spatial complexity of object-oriented software
4. Proposed spatial complexity measures
5. Class spatial complexity
5.1. Class attribute spatial complexity
5.2. Class method spatial complexity
5.3. Significance of class spatial complexity
6. Object spatial complexity
6.1. Object definition spatial complexity
6.2. Object-member usage spatial complexity
6.3. Significance of object spatial complexity
7. Future work
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References






 
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