ABSTRACT

Inheritance is the vital feature of any object oriented software which provides reuse of exiting classes for designing new classes. Higher reuse provides higher productivity and greater quality. Inheritance hierarchy is one of the very important artifacts targeted for measurement of reuse and reusability. Reuse through inheritance hierarchy can be measured from two dimensions- Depth and Breadth. Higher depth and breadth may increase complexity of software which makes the software difficult to understand and maintain. This paper aimed to correlate the depth and breadth of inheritance hierarchy with reuse and complexity of inheritance hierarchy using design oriented metrics.