The software developers’ view on product metrics — A survey-based experiment

Object-oriented metrics are becoming evermore popular and they are used in many different areas of software development. Many researchers have showed in practice that object-oriented metrics can be efficiently used for quality assurance. For example, a lot of experimental results confirm that some of the object-oriented metrics (like coupling, size, and complexity) are able to predict the fault-proneness of classes. Quality assurance experts usually accept that actively applying metrics can help their work. On the other hand, developers tend not to use metrics because they do not know about them, or if they do know about them, they do not really know how to use them. Hence we devised a Survey to ask developers with different levels of experience about the use of metrics. Our hypothesis was that developers with different levels of experience might have significantly different views about the usefulness of metrics. In the Survey four metrics (size, complexity, coupling, and code duplication) were examined. The Survey asked questions about the participants’ experience and skills, then it asked questions about how the participants would probably use these metrics for software testing or program comprehension, and at the end the relative importance of the metrics was assessed. The main result of the Survey is a list which contains those cases where the views about the metrics from developers having different experience significantly differ. We think that getting to know the developers’ views better can help us to create better quality models based on object-oriented metrics