An object-oriented method for evolving and evaluating object-oriented design metric models
The principal contribution of this thesis is the development of an object-oriented method with supporting software for evolving and evaluating object-oriented design metric models. Called PROOF, it combines and improves on existing individually inadequate methods by using underlying concepts of recent object-oriented system lifecycle models and software construction principles. PROOF is grounded in a formal model of object-orientation, and an object-oriented metric model which provides mechanisms for explicit elicitation of the essential elements of a well-formed metric model, and embodies this knowledge as reusable operational components. We claim that PROOF is an advance on alternative metric modeling methods. It provides guiding support mechanisms for defining goals and transforming them into well-formed operational object-oriented design metric models, for theoretical and empirical evaluation, for feedback, learning and improvement, and for storing, applying, and reusing object-oriented design metric models. The necessary technology for organisations to evolve, evaluate, and apply object-oriented design metric models to implement an iterative quality refining process, and reach the optimising level (level 5) of the CMM process maturity levels has been embodied within PROOF.
We substantiate the claims of PROOF by evaluating various well referenced existing object-oriented design metric models to highlight their deficiencies. PROOF is then used to evolve new metric models which solve the inherent problems of the original models.
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Author requested conversion to open access 26 Oct 2022
