Building a User Oriented Application for Generic Source Code Metrics Extraction from a Metrics Framework

Software metrics are an essential tool in the software measurement process. As software systems grow, and in consequence their corresponding source code, automated tools for source code metrics extraction, usually known as Software Metric Tools, should be developed in order to aid the user to correctly achieve the process. Even though these tools are of great help, they have certain issues and are limited by the set of accepted metrics and programming languages. This paper propose a new type of metric tool aimed to be user oriented, meaning that the tool provides mechanisms that allow the user to define his own metrics and incorporate new languages. A tool with these characteristics requires more complex methodologies for its construction. In this paper we describe the problematic of current software tools and the construction of a user oriented tool which presents advantages over the current tools.