3 Getting Started

Figure 1: SDMetrics main window

Calculating a set of metrics takes four steps:

1. Specify the XMI file with your UML design
2. Calculate the metrics
3. Explore the metric data
4. Export the metric data for further processing

Click the  button or select "Project -> Edit Project Settings" from the menu bar.

Figure 2: Project File Settings Dialog

You specify the XMI file to read in the "XMI Source File" box at the top of the project settings dialog. Click the topmost "Browse..." button and use the file chooser dialog to select your XMI file.

At this point, you don't need to worry about the remaining options in the Project File Settings dialog; leave everything at "Automatic" and "use default", and click the "OK" button to confirm your selection.

Step 2: Calculate the metrics

After you specified your project files, select "Project->Calculate Metrics" from the menu bar, or click the  button on the tool bar. SDMetrics will read your XMI design file and calculate the metrics. This is a fully automated process that usually takes a few seconds. You can monitor its progress on the status bar.

Figure 3: Table view of calculated metrics

Step 3: Explore the metric data

To explore the metric data, SDMetrics provides several views of the data, for instance:

• Metric data tables
  Presents a tabular view of all metric data. Select the type of elements (packages, classes, etc) you want to see from the dropdown list in the upper tool bar of the view. You can sort the table according to metric values, and highlight outliers (model elements with relatively high metric values).
• Histograms
  In this view you can browse histograms and cumulative distribution charts for the metrics. The view also displays descriptive statistics such as mean/minimum/maximum values and percentiles for one metric at a time.
• Kiviat Diagrams
  This view shows Kiviat diagrams for the model elements. The diagrams provide a summary of all metric values for one design element at a time.

Step 4: Export the metrics data for further processing

You can export the metric data tables for further processing with your favorite spreadsheet software or statistical software packages. Go back to the "Metric Data Tables" view and click the  button on the upper right corner of the view. This opens the data export dialog window.

Figure 4: Data Export Dialog

Here you can specify whether to write the data tables to one or several output files, and select the file format for the output files (tab-separated text, HTML, etc).

This completes the brief guided tour of some of SDMetrics' most important features. The following section describes these and all other features of SDMetrics in detail.