View article

There is a plethora of studies investigating object-oriented measures and their link with external quality attributes, but usefulness of the measures may differ across empirical studies. This study aims to aggregate and identify useful object-oriented measures, specifically those obtainable from the source code of object-oriented systems that have gone through such empirical evaluation. By conducting a systematic literature review, 99 primary studies were identified and traced to four external quality attributes: reliability, maintainability, effectiveness and functionality. A vote-counting approach was used to investigate the link between object-oriented measures and the attributes, and to also assess the consistency of the relation reported across empirical studies. Most of the studies investigate links between object-oriented measures and proxies for reliability attributes, followed by proxies for maintainability. The …