A Metrics Based Approach to Evaluate Design of Software Components

Abstract

Component based software development approach makes use of already existing software components to build new applications. Software components may be available in-house or acquired from the global market. One of the most critical activities in this reuse based process is the selection of appropriate components. Component evaluation is the core of the component selection process. Component quality models have been proposed to decide upon a criterion against which candidate components can be evaluated and then compared. But none is complete enough to carry out the evaluation.It is advocated that component users need not bother about the internal details of the components. But we believe that complexity of the internal structure of the component can help estimating the effort related to evolution of the component. In our ongoing research, we are focusing on quality of internal design of a software component and its relationship to the external quality attributes of the component.

Multidimentional size measure for design of component-based software system

“…2. There is a huge gap in the information required by the component users and the information provided by the component providers [2,4,5,15]. 3.…”

“…It is advocated that component users need not be concerned about the internal details of the components [1]. However, they cannot totally ignore the internal construction of components because only a few components can be integrated as-is [2]. Unlike traditional software providers, component providers do not have knowledge of all the possible uses of the components.…”

“…However, carrying out such changes in third-party components is very difficult because of the lack of access to the internal details of a component. Moreover, both component providers and component users have not yet agreed upon a common framework for evaluation of software components size [2,4,5].…”

Measuring Qualities for OSGi Component-Based Applications

“…These studies disregard the internal code. However, some studies such as [23], [4] have emphasized the importance of the internal code for a component. They consider that internal design can not be simply ignored since some internal attributes of a component may provide an indirect measurement of its external characteristics.…”

“…To realize this aim, they need some dedicated metrics. Several (product level) metric or set of metrics have been proposed specifically for the component paradigm [1], [4], [5], [6], [7]. But as stated by [8] in their survey: i) there is no consensus yet on many of the concepts and elements that are measured by these metrics, ii) inconsistencies in component definitions can frequently be found in many studies, iii) they lack a statistically significant experimental validation and a set of experimental data to provide better insight into their use.…”