Application of Object-Oriented Metrics To C++ and Java

The increasing importance of software measurement has led to design and development of new software measures. As the development of object-oriented software is rising, more and more metrics are being defined for object-oriented programming languages. But there is a little understanding of comparative application of many of these measures to different programming languages. As a consequence, it is very difficult for software managers and developers to select suitable measures and programming languages for object-oriented systems. In this paper, we investigate 23 object-oriented metrics proposed by various researchers. The metrics are applied to same set of 15 programs coded in C++ and Java in an attempt to make comparative study of these two prominent object-oriented programming languages. The work done here reveals that these object-oriented metrics can be applied successfully to both Java and C++. But, Java proves to be more object-oriented than C++ as per intuition. However, counting rules defined for computation of these metrics should be framed more carefully.