Metrics for maintainability of class inheritance hierarchies

Since the proposal for the six object‐oriented metrics by Chidamber and Kemerer (1994), several studies have been conducted to validate their metrics and have discovered some deficiencies. Consequently, many new metrics for object‐oriented systems have been proposed. Among the various measurements of object‐oriented characteristics, we focus on the metrics of class inheritance hierarchies in design and maintenance. As such, we propose two simple and heuristic metrics for the class inheritance hierarchy for the maintenance of object‐oriented software. In this paper we investigate the work of Chidamber and Kemerer (1994) and Li (1998), and extend their work to apply specifically to the maintenance of a class inheritance hierarchy. In doing so, we suggest new metrics for understandability and modifiability of a class inheritance hierarchy. The main contribution here includes the various comparisons that we have made. We discuss the advantages over Chidamber and Kemerer's (1994) metrics and Henderson‐Sellers's (1996) metrics in the context of maintaining class inheritance hierarchies. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.