Chapter 6 - Measuring and Improving the Quality of Your Work—Object-Oriented Metrics

Summary

What We'll Learn in This Chapter

What metrics are and why they're important for object-oriented (OO) development.

Which metrics work for OO and which ones don't.

What metrics to use for estimating projects, improving your development efforts, selecting the right tools, and improving your development process.

How to use metrics effectively on your OO development projects.

Project managers are constantly inundated with questions about the status of their project. How good is our design? Can we start coding now? How long will the project take? How big is the project? How much will it cost? How many people do we need? Questions that are difficult, if not impossible, to answer with any certainty without taking measurements of specific factors that address these issues. But what should you measure? A good question.

One of the reasons, very often the main reason, that firms move into object orientation is that they want to improve the quality of the applications that they develop. They want systems that are easier to maintain. They want systems that are easier to extend. They want to develop systems better, faster, and cheaper. The question is “How do you know that you've succeeded?” In this chapter we'll see that metrics are used to answer this question.

There are a lot of object-oriented (OO) development environments and techniques available to you. Although this sounds good, the problem is that it isn't always clear which ones are the best ones for you.