Object oriented inheritance metric-reusability perspective

Inheritance, a concept of object oriented programming is a vital concept behind the creation of reusable software. The subject of reuse has received much attention as reusability is one of the promising ways to improve software quality. Identifying highly inherited modules give pathway to measure and improve the software quality. The existing inheritance metrics are quite primitive which gives only rough estimate of inheritance of a class or lack validation support. In this paper, inheritance metric based on reusability of UML software designs has been proposed. This measure differs from the existing inheritance metrics in two respects: it considers the number of attributes or methods inherited which is main aspect of inheritance. Second, it targets the two fold behaviour of reusability along the depth of inheritance tree. We prove the theoretical soundness of the proposed metric by Weyuker's nine axioms and give the empirical analysis of proposed metric against existing reusability based inheritance metric.