Output Measurement Metrics in an Object-Oriented Computer Aided Software Engineering (Case) Environment : Critique, Evaluation and Proposal

Output measurement metrics for the softwaredevelopment process need to be re-examined todetermine their performance in the new, radicallychanged CASE development environment. This papercritiques and empirically evaluates several approachesto the measurement of outputs from the CASE process.The primary metric evaluated is the function pointsmethod developed by Albrecht. A second metrictested is a short-form variation of function points thatis easier and quicker to calculate. We also propose anew output metric called object points and a relatedshort-form, which are specialized for outputmeasurement in object-oriented CASE environmentsthat include a central object repository. These metricsare proposed as more intuitive and lower costapproaches to measuring the CASE outputs. Ourpreliminary results show that these metrics have thepotential to yield as accurate, if not better, estimatesthan function points-based measures