Ans :
Measurement is fundamental to any engineering discipline and software engineering
is no exception. Software metric is a quantitative measure derived from the attribute
of software development life cycle [Fanton and Kaposi, 1987]. It behaves as software
measures.
A software measure is a mapping from a set of objects in the software engineering
world into a set of mathematical constructs such as numbers or vectors of numbers.
Using the software metrics, software engineer measures software processes, and the
requirements for that process. The software measures are done according to the
following parameters:
The objective of software and problems associated with current activities,
The cost of software required for relevant planning relative to future projects,
Testability and maintainability of various processes and products,
Quality of software attributes like reliability, portability and maintainability,
Utility of software product,
User friendliness of a product.
Various characteristics of software measures identified by Basili (1989) are given
below:
Objects of measurement: They indicate the products and processes to be
measured.
Source of measurement: It indicates who will measure the software. For
example, software designer, software tester and software managers.
Property of measurement: It indicates the attribute to be measured like cost of
software, reliability, maintainability, size and portability.
Context of measurement: It indicates the environments in which context the
software measurements are applied.
Common software measures
There are significant numbers of software measures. The following are a few
common software measures:
Size : It indicates the magnitude of software system. It is most commonly used
software measure. It is indicative measure of memory requirement, maintenance
effort, and development time.
LOC : It represents the number of lines of code (LOC). It is indicative measure of
size oriented software measure. There is some standardisation on the methodology of
counting of lines. In this, the blank lines and comments are excluded. The multiple
statements present in a single line are considered as a single LOC. The lines
containing program header and declarations are counted.
