An empirical study into the use of measurement to support OO design evaluation

This paper describes a case study into using measurement to aid design evaluation. The study was carried out as an assignment by final year B.Sc. students from an I.T. course. Approximately half of these were part time students working full time in industry and the others were full time students who had already undertaken a one year industrial placement. After some preparatory tuition, the subjects were given a small system (15 classes) written in Java and an analysis tool to enable them to apply a wide variety of metrics to this system. They were then asked to use measurement results and design heuristics to help them critique the design of the system. The main results from this work were that: measurement was found to be a useful aid to design evaluation; following the study, most subjects said that they would now be more inclined to use measurement than they there previously; support is needed for measurement selection as well as measurement collection; there were significant differences in the way the task was carried out between the full time students and the industrial subjects.