Comparison of Class Inheritance and Interface Usage in Object Oriented Programming through Complexity Measures

It is widely acknowledged that in software engineering, the usage of metrics at the initial phases of the object oriented software can help designers to make better decisions. The quality of class diagrams could be a major determinant for the quality of the software product that is finally delivered. Quantitative measurements are useful to assess class diagram quality. Following this innovative thinking, two UML class diagrams are taken to measure the complexity and size. A set of metrics of complexity measures are used to measure the class diagrams. Seven known complexity measures are evaluated and compared for inheritance and interface usage in object oriented programming. Two UML class diagrams are introduced with possible interfaces and measured the complexity metrics and a comparison has been made between the class inheritance and class interface usage through complexity measurements.