A composite complexity measure for component-based systems

Abstract

The increasing importance of software measurement has led to design and development of new software measures. Controlling and minimizing software complexity is the most important objective of each software development paradigm because it affects all other software quality attributes like reusability, reliability, testability, maintainability etc. For this purpose, a number of software complexity measures have been reported to quantify different aspects of complexity. Component-based software development (CBSD) is an evolving paradigm where emphasis is laid on reuse of existing components and effective designing of new components. As the development of component-based software is rising, more and more complexity metrics are being developed for the same. In this paper, we have attempted to design a composite complexity measure to quantify important aspects of complexity of a component-based system. The proposed measure takes into account two major complexities of a component-based system : one due to individual component and the other due to its interaction with other components. Individual component complexity may arise due to size of a component, type and nesting level of control structures present in code component. Component's interaction complexity may be due to its interface with other components. Graph theoretic notions and concept of weights have been used to illustrate interaction among software components and to compute complexity. The proposed measure has been applied to four cases chosen for present study and yields quiet encouraging results which may further help in controlling the complexity of component-based systems so as to minimize both integration and maintenance efforts.