Metric

Metric Explain

METRIC 9: Number of Children (NOC)

The number of children is the number of immediate subclasses subordinate to a class in the hierarchy. It is an indicator of the potential influence a class can have on the design and on the system. The greater the number of children, the greater the likelihood of improper abstraction of the parent and may be a case of misuse of subclassing. But the greater the number of children, the greater the reusability since inheritance is a form of reuse. If a class has a large number of children, it may require more testing of the methods of that class, thus increase the testing time. NOC, therefore, primarily evaluates Efficiency, Reusability, and Testability [1,4,5,7].

Reference

• https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fc8c/16be91c43bb15b72e2c73728839c1a9468ef.pdf
• https://www.ndepend.com/docs/code-metrics