Objective measurement of test quality is one of the key issues in software testing. It has been a major research focus for the last two decades. Many test criteria have been proposed and studied for this purpose. Various kinds of rationales have been presented in support of one criterion or another. We survey the research work in

The metrics suite for object-oriented design put forward by Chidamber and Kemerer [8] is partly evaluated by applying principles of measurement theory. Using the object coupling measure (CBO) as an example, it is shown that failing to establish a sound empirical relation system can lead to deficiencies of software metrics. Similarly, for the object-oriented cohesion measure (LCOM) it is pointed out that the issue of empirical testing the representation condition must not be ignored, even if other validation principles are carefully obeyed. As a by-product, an alternative formulation for LCOM is proposed. Index Terms Software Measurement, Coupling Metrics, Cohesion Metrics, Object-Orientation,Validation Copyright Notice This paper has been published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 22, No. 4, April 1996. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new coll...

We propose an approach (GQM/MEDEA) for defining measures of product attributes in software engineering. The approach is driven by the experimental goals of measurement, expressed via the GQM paradigm, and a set of empirical hypotheses. To make

The availability of significant measures in the early phases of the software development life-cycle allows for better management of the later phases, and more effective quality assessment when quality can be more easily affected by preventive or corrective actions. In this paper, we introduce and compare various high-level design measures for object-based software systems. The measures

Abstract—This paper describes the results of an investigation into a set of metrics for object-oriented design, called the MOOD metrics. The merits of each of the six MOOD metrics is discussed from a measurement theory viewpoint, taking into account the recognized object-oriented features which they were intended to measure: encapsulation, inheritance, coupling, and polymorphism. Empirical data, collected from three different application domains, is then analyzed using the MOOD metrics, to support this theoretical validation. Results show that (with appropriate changes to remove existing problematic discontinuities) the metrics could be used to provide an overall assessment of a software system, which may be helpful to managers of software development projects. However, further empirical studies are needed before these results can be generalized. Index Terms—Empirical software engineering, validating software metrics, assessing object-oriented software.

Elements of measurement theory have recently been introduced into the software engineering discipline. It has been suggested that these elements should serve as the basis for developing, reasoning about, and applying measures. For example, it has been suggested that software complexity measures should be additive, that measures fall into a number of distinct types (i.e., levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio), that certain statistical techniques are not appropriate for certain types of measures (e.g., parametric statistics for less-than-interval measures), and that certain transformations are not permissible for certain types of measures (e.g., non-linear transformations for interval measures). In this paper we argue that, inspite of the importance of measurement theory, and in the context of software engineering, many of these prescriptions and proscriptions are either premature or, if strictly applied, would represent a substantial hindrance to the progress of ...

Obfuscation can be a simple tool for soft- ware protection. In this paper we present a method of machine code obfuscation, which can be applied to most present processors. The obfuscation method is based on a theory, which led to two useful theorems. The proposed algorithm of obfuscation was implemented and tested using analytical and empirical approaches. The obtained results give the first estimation of the maximum possible eciency of the obfuscation process.

this paper, we propose a Security Measurement (SM) framework to overcome some of the problems. This framework should help us to:

We identify and analyze basic principles which necessarily underlie software measures research. In the prevailing paradigm for the validation of software measures there is a fundamental assumption that the sets of measured documents are ordered, and that measures should report these orders. We describe mathematically the nature of such orders. Consideration of these orders suggests a hierarchy of software document measures, a methodology for developing new measures, and a general approach to the analytical evaluation of measures. We also point out the importance of units for any type of measurement and stress the perils of equating document structure complexity and psychological complexity. Keywords: software measures, abstractions of software documents, software structure, analytical evaluations of measures 1 Introduction This paper presents some underlying principles for software measures research. By "software measures" we mean measures which are obtainable directly from software d...

In this paper we present a concrete method for validating software product measures for internal attributes and provide guidelines for its application. This method integrates much of the relevant previous work, such as measurement theory, properties of measures, and GQM. We identify two types of validation: theoretical and empirical. The former addresses the question "is the measure measuring the attribute it is purporting to measure?", and the latter addresses the question "is the measure useful in the sense that it is related to other variables in expected ways?"