Class hierarchy based metric for object-oriented design

Object-oriented technology, including object-oriented analysis (OOA), object-oriented design (OOD), and object-oriented programming (OOP), is a new promising approach to developing software systems to reduce software costs and to increase software extensibility, flexibility, and reusability. Software metrics are widely used to measure software complexity and assure software correctness. This paper proposes a metric to measure object-oriented software. Also, an important factor called URIs, is conducted to build the metric. This approach describes a graph-theoretical method for measuring the complexity of the class hierarchy. The proposed metric shows that inheritance has a close relation with object-oriented software complexity and reveals that misuse of repeated (multiple) inheritance will increase software complexity and be prone to implicit software errors.<>