| Abstract | Many object-oriented metrics have been proposed, and at least fourteen empirical validations of these metrics have been performed. However, recently it was noted that without controlling for the effect of class size in a validation study, the impact of a metric may be exaggerated. It thus becomes necessary to re-validate contemporary object-oriented metrics after controlling for size. In this paper we perform a validation study on a telecommunications C++ system. We investigate 24 metrics proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer and Briand et al. Our dependent variable was the incidence of faults due to field failures (fault-proneness). Our results indicate that out of the 24 metrics (covering coupling, cohesion, inheritance, and complexity), only four are actually related to faults after controlling for class size, and that only two of these are useful for the construction of prediction models. The two selected metrics measure coupling. The best prediction model exhibits high accuracy. |
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