• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.780-787
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• 2005

Many researches and validations for the complexity metrics of the object-oriented systems have been studied. Most of them are aimed for the measurement of the partial aspects of the systems, for example, the coupling between objects, the complexity of inheritance structures, the cohesion of methods, and so on. But the software practitioners want to measure the complexity of overall system, not partial. We studied the complexity of the overall structures of object-oriented systems by analyzing the class diagram of UML. The class diagram is composed of classes and their relations. There are three kinds of relations, association, generalization, and aggregation, which are making the structure of object-oriented systems to be difficult to understand. We proposed a heuristic metric to measure the complexity of object-oriented systems by putting together the three kinds of the relations. Tn analyze the complexity of the structure of a object-oriented system for the maintainability of the system, we measured the degree of understandability of it, the reverse engineering time to draw a class diagram from the source codes, and the number of errors in the diagram. The results of this experiment shows that our proposed metric has a considerable relationship with the complexity of object-oriented systems. The metric will be helpful to the software developers for their designing tasks by evaluating the complexity of the structures of object-oriented systems and redesigning tasks , of them for the future maintainability.