Measurements of Inheritance Design Quality

Though Object-Oriented (OO) programming has long been a core component of CS2 classes, there are no generally accepted standards as to what constitutes good inheritance design. This is in sharp contrast to the excellent metrics that exist for algorithm design and efficiency, modularization design, encapsulation design, and overall code quality. The purpose of this paper is to identify valid, reliable, understandable, and instructive metrics of inheritance design quality to help students, practitioners, and educators to write better code.