A Metric for the Activeness of a Class

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Class Activeness Metric, a new measure to evaluate how accessible class members are, aiming to improve object interaction simplicity and class design quality.

Contribution

The paper presents the first formal metric to quantify class accessibility, aiding in assessing and improving class design in object-oriented programming.

Findings

The metric effectively measures class accessibility.

Higher activeness correlates with easier object interactions.

The metric can guide better class design decisions.

Abstract

In this paper, the authors propose a software metric called Class Activeness Metric which helps to determine the level of accessibility of the members of a class when it is instantiated as objects. Object interactions need to be straight forward as far as possible as complexity in these interactions can lead to time delays in accessing members not just confusing inheritance hierarchies. For object interactions to be non-complex, the classes must be designed well so that they are easily accessible. This necessitates the development of a metric for gauging the quality of design of a class. This metric is the Class Activeness Metric.