The demand for increased software quality has resulted in quality being more of differentiator between products than it ever has been before. For this reason, software developers need objective and valid measures for use in the evaluation and improvement of product quality from the initial stages of development. Class diagrams are a key artifact in the development of object-oriented (OO) software because they lay the foundation for all later design and implementation work. It follows that emphasizing class diagram quality may significantly contribute to higher quality OO software systems. The primary aim of this work, therefore, is to present a survey, as complete as possible, of the existing relevant works regarding class diagram metrics. Thus, from works previously published, researchers and practitioners alike may gain broad and ready access to insights for measuring these quality characteristics. Another aim of this work is to help reveal areas of research either lacking completion or yet to undertaken. 1

In this paper, we present an FP-like approach, named Class Point, which was conceived to estimate the size of objectoriented products. In particular, two measures are proposed, which are theoretically validated showing that they satisfy well-known properties necessary for size measures. An initial empirical validation is also performed, meant to assess the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed measures to predict the development effort of object-oriented systems. Moreover, a comparative analysis is carried out, taking into account several other size measures.

We report about an empirical software engineering course for PhD students. We introduce its syllabus and two different pedagogical strategies. The first strategy is based on individual learning and presentations. The second relies also on social activities to support learning and knowledge sharing. The syllabus, which has been used for three iterations of the course, is available at our web site together with student essays, evaluation data, and other documentation produced during course runs. 1.