Predicting Software Maintainability Using Object Oriented Dynamic Complexity Measures

Dynamic measures are the class of software measures which are obtained when the software is executing and hence can give accurate information regarding the run-time quality of software. For this reason, many dynamic measures have been proposed in recent past, however, little or no empirical evidence exists about the usefulness of these measures for software quality prediction. The objective of this paper is to empirically validate an OO dynamic complexity measure from authors' previous work [19] to assess its ability for predicting maintainability as external software quality attribute. A controlled experiment is carried out in this regard and correlation and linear regression have been performed on the experimental data. The results of the experiment suggest that OO dynamic complexity measures can serve as a useful indicator of maintainability.