A tool for process and product assessment of C++ applications

The present diffusion of the object oriented paradigm and of the techniques for keeping the development process under control must be supported by suitable tools. These tools should be based on confident and validated object oriented metrics for assessing the several aspects of product and process development: effort, maintainability, reusability, etc.; they should also be capable of supporting the definition of specific metrics, profiles and histograms. These are useful to give the developers and managers an immediate representation of the system status. These tools must also provide metrics suitable for producing confident results from the early phases of the development life cycle. Mechanisms for metrics definition, validation and tuning must be available in order to establish a process of continuous improvement. The paper presents TAC++ (Tool for Analyzing C++ Code) which supports the above mentioned features and includes the most important metrics presented in the literature and many others.