A Catalogue of Thresholds for Object-Oriented Software Metrics

Thresholds for the majority of software metrics are still not known. This might be the reason why a measurement method that should be part of a software quality assessment process is not yet present in object-oriented software industry. In this work, we applied an empirical method to 111 system dataset, identifying thresholds for 17 object-oriented software metrics. Furthermore, we propose some improvements in this employed method. Differently from previous work, we have developed a catalogue of thresholds that gathers a greater amount of object-oriented software metrics, allowing the assessment of methods, classes and packages. Our approach suggests three ranges in the thresholds: Good/Common, Regular/Casual and Bad/Uncommon. Although they do not necessarily express the best practices in Software Engineering, they reflect a quality standard followed by most of the evaluated software. To evaluate our catalogue, we present a case study which shows its application in the evaluation of a proprietary software, in contrast with the developers consensus about its internal quality. Results show that our thresholds are capable of indicating the real panorama of the evaluated software. Keywords–Software Engineering; Object-oriented programming; Quality analysis and evaluation; Metrics/Measurement.