Axiomatic foundations for structural software metrics

The field of software metrication can be divided between those measurement techniques that are largely textual vs. those that are more structural (i.e. based on the decomposition structure of the underlying flowgraph). We are concerned with the latter. Methods are presented for the effective design of new structural or hierarchical metrics within a uniform methodology, while proposing a corresponding new axiomatic framework capturing the essential features of those classical metrics found in the applications. Our methodology is sufficiently flexible as to allow for a uniform design technique for extending a measure defined only for structured flowgraphs, to a hierarchical metric-in the strong sense that it be applicable to the entire class of flowgraphs (i.e. programs), and that the resulting extension be guaranteed to satisfy the proposed axiomatic scheme.<>