QScope: an open, extensible framework for measuring software projects

To measure the particularities of modern software development projects that use different types of documents for the implementation of a program, new metrics need to be defined. Further, well established metrics, such as e.g., lack of cohesion or coupling between objects need to be reconsidered in the presence of new language features. Not being able to thoroughly measure a project can lead to false conclusions with respect to the measured source files. Currently, a large number of metrics tools exists, but unfortunately most tools are not extensible, or they are limited with respect to the types of documents that can be taken into account. Further, support for testing newly developed metrics is also missing. In this paper, we present QScope $an open, extensible metrics framework. QScope is open with respect to the supported artifacts and explicitly enables the user to implement new metrics by reasoning over all artifacts using a declarative query language. As we showed in this paper, using a declarative query language enables a concise definition of new metrics.