Meta Analysis – a Method of Combining Empirical Results and its Application in Object-Oriented Software Systems

Understanding and controlling software development processes have gained increasing importance. In this sense experimentation is an accepted approach toward scientific disciplines, including the software development community. It enables us to establish and validate measures that give comprehensive and accurate quantitative description of the characteristics of these systems. However, individual experimental studies tend to yield different results and draw different conclusions on the same phenomena. One way to make sense of the vast number of accumulated study findings is to apply meta-analysis to the results of individual studies. The intent of this paper is to review the principles of meta-analytic methods and techniques, their applications in different sciences and software engineering, and present results achieved in these fields. Particular attention is paid to object-oriented software measures and their numeric characterization.