Object-oriented graphical information systems: Research plan and evaluation metrics

The object-oriented design strategy, as both a problem decomposition and a system-implementation methodology, holds significant potential benefits for software design and implementation in scientific computing environments. Additionally, certain characteristics of object-oriented systems are particularly suited to supporting graphics-application development. This paper presents the initial direction and organization of research and development activities in the area of object-oriented graphical information systems at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. These activities, structured as a four-phase research plan, are intended to provide significant and extensible results in the evaluation of the impact of object-oriented methodologies on graphical-information system design and implementation. The long-term goals of this research include the formulation of complexity models for object-oriented development of software and the formulation and validation of software-development metrics appropriate to object-oriented systems.