Chiang Mai Journal of Science

Class diagrams provide mainly graphical notations to represent design artifacts used as blueprints for object-oriented software development. The result gained from measuring modifiability of class diagrams in the early phase can be used as a prime indicator whether toredesign software in order to reduce cost of software maintenance in a later phase. This paper proposes a new metric set for evaluating modifiability of object-oriented designs. These metrics can be measured from class diagrams. Different kinds of relationship influence the dependency between classes to a different degree. In this work modifiability metrics are constructed by considering relationships among classes. An experiment carried out in order to validate the ability of the proposed metrics is also presented. The experimental result shows that the new proposed metrics significantly correlate with human beings’ view of modifiability. Keywords: modifiability, class diagram, software metric.