A survey of dynamic software metrics

Abstract Software metrics help us to make meaningful estimates for software products and guide us in taking managerial and technical decisions. However, conventional static metrics have been found to be inadequate for modern object-oriented software due to the presence of object-oriented features such as polymorphism, dynamic binding, inheritance and unused code. This fact motivates us to focus on dynamic metrics in place of traditional static metrics. Moreover, dynamic metrics are more precise than static metrics as they are able to capture the dynamic behaviour of the software system during measurement. These dynamic metrics are usually obtained from the execution traces of the code or from the executable models. In this paper, advantages of dynamic metrics over static metrics are discussed and then a survey of the existing dynamic metrics is carried out. These metrics are characterized into different categories such as dynamic coupling metrics, dynamic cohesion metrics. Towards end of the paper, potential research challenges and opportunities in the field of dynamic metrics are identified.