A Product Metrics Tool Integrated into a Software Development Environment

The goal of the project Crocodile is to provide concepts and tools for an effective usage of quantitative product measurement to support and facilitate design and code reviews. Our application field is the realm of object oriented programs and, particularly, reusable frameworks. The main concepts are Measurement tool integration into existing software development environments, using existing tool sets and integration mechanisms, mechanisms to define flexible product quality models based on a factor-criteria-metrics approach, the use of meaningful measurement contexts isolating or combining product components to be reviewed, effective filtering and presentation of measurement data. Our current implementation platform for a tool providing these concepts is TakeFive's SNiFF+, an industrial strength integrated C++/Java programming environment (cf. [Pfei97]). Crocodile provides comprehensive static analysis features like those implemented e.g. in Audit-C/C++ by SemaGroup (cf. [Mari97]) and it can be fully integrated into an existing development environment.