Comparing SW metric tools

Comparing software metrics tools
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1390630.1390648

I was looking for a paper the other day that would describe metric suites and I found this one (by accident). I've read it and it looks like it should be an inspiration for many master students. I see tons of thesis proposals that want to compare tools in one way or another - this is the way to do it.

There are a few things that I wanted to stress about this paper:

• The method of comparison: they've turned a rather straightforward task into something interesting - defined a hypothesis and made a quasi-experiment to evaluate it
• The metric suite - although metrics are well known, this paper shows that still the measurement method (ISO/IEC 15939) differs a lot between the tools - nice!
• The link to quality aspects (although not perfect) - makes the comparison much "deeper" than just a dry number-cruncher.

Finally, I think that the use of ISO 9126 is a bit too old - wake up: ISO/IEC 25000 has been released!