Modeling the object-oriented space through validated measures

In order to truly understand software and the software development process, software measurement must be better understood. A beginning step toward a better understanding of software measurement is the categorization of the measurements by some meaningful taxonomy. The most meaningful taxonomy would capture the basic nature of the object-oriented (O-O) space. The interesting characteristics of object-oriented software offer a starting point for such a categorization of measures. A taxonomy has been developed based upon fourteen characteristics of object-oriented software gathered from the literature. This taxonomy allows us to easily see gaps and redundancies in the O-O measures. The taxonomy also clearly differentiates among taxa so that there is no ambiguity as to the taxon to which a measure belongs. The taxonomy has been populated with thirty-two measures that have been validated in the narrow sense of Fenton (1991) using measurement theory with Zuse's (1996) augmentation.