Inheritance Metrics for Object-Oriented Design

The inheritance metrics give us information about the inheritance tree of the system. Inheritance is a key feature of the Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm. This mechanism supports the class hierarchy design and captures the IS-A relationship between a super class and its subclass. Several OO inheritance metrics have been proposed and their reviews are available in the literature. Among the various measurements we focus on the metrics of class inheritance hierarchies. In this paper we consider the inheritance metrics of F.T. Sheldon et al (2002) and Henderson Seller's (1996) for comparison with proposed inheritance metric suites. In doing so, an attempt has been made to define empirical relationship between the proposed inheritance metric suites with considered existing inheritance metrics and the focus was on which how the inheritance metric suites were correlated with the existing ones. Data for several C++ classes has been collected from various sources.