e Abreu, F.: A Formal Library for Aiding Metrics Extraction

This paper presents a library of measures, named FLAME – A Formal Library for Aiding Metrics Extraction, which is mainly used to formalize object-oriented design metrics definitions. The library itself is formalized with the Object Constraint Language upon the UML meta-model. The combination of FLAME functions together with the UML meta-model allow unambiguous metrics definitions, which in turn help increasing tool support for object-oriented metrics extraction. When applied to the object-oriented design, the metrics definitions performed with FLAME make available a set of comparisons among different models, leading to recommendations and conclusions for the developers. These assumptions can help improving the quality of object-oriented design, as well as they indirectly help in the enhancement of this methodology, contributing to the progress of the overall software life cycle