Quantitative Approaches in Object-oriented Software Engineering

Software internal attributes have been extensively used to help software managers, customers and users to characterize, assess and improve the quality of software products.

Software measures have been adopted to increase understanding of how software internal attributes affect overall software quality.

Estimation models based on software measures have been used successfully to perform risk analysis and to assess software maintainability, reusability and reliability.

The object-oriented approach presents an advance in technology, providing more powerful design mechanisms and new technologies.

These include OO frameworks, analysis/design patterns, architectures and components that have all been proposed to improve software engineering productivity and software quality.

The key topics in this publication cover metrics collection, quality assessment, metrics validation and process management.

The contributors are from leading research establishments in Europe, South America and Canada.