ABSTRACT Software quality metrics are very crucial in software development. As a result, many metrics suites were proposed by various researchers and practitioners to measure and assess software quality. Most of those exisitng suites captures specific dimension of quality, such as class size or polymorphism , coupling and cohesion, and give results hesitates between evaluating the entire system and evaluating each item individually, even they were developed before UML emergence. Also, they focus on certain features of object-oriented metrics and ignore others. Our proposed work is a unified hybrid metrics suite (HCLKM) developed for evaluating the design of object- oriented software in early deisgn UML phases which covers important aspects and dimensions of software quality and provides initial indicator of development track correctness in time which changes are nearly costless. To assess correctness of results a custom metrics extraction tool was developed which operates on UML design models and corresponding XMI files to assure independency results. Two examples at different disciplines are used for illustration: Laboratory Certification System and MIDAS microarray tools.
