Measuring complexity of component based architecture: a graph based approach

  • Authors:

  • Sabnam Sengupta;Ananya Kanjilal;Swapan Bhattacharya

  • Affiliations:

  • B.P. Poddar Institute of Management and Technology, Kolkata, India;B.P. Poddar Institute of Management and Technology, Kolkata, India;National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, West Bengal, India

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Component based software development (CBSD) is an evolving paradigm where emphasis is laid on reuse of existing components and effective designing of components. As complexity of software systems increases, the challenge of CBSD lies in designing highly cohesive, testable components. Researcher community is striving hard to identify the attributes characterizing component-based development and proposing metrics that may help in controlling the complexity of the component-based systems. This paper proposes a metric-based approach for the determination of complexity along with a set of architectural aspects of componentbased architectures. The Component Architecture Complexity Measurement Metrics (CACMM) has been proposed based on Component Architecture Graph (CAG), a graphical model used for representing UML component diagram. Analysis of the graph is done to measure complexity at different levels -- individual component level, component-to-component level and the complexity for the overall architecture. This metrics may be used by developers to assess the component based architecture and if required re-design to create highly cohesive components with minimal coupling. A case study is presented for deriving the complexity along with the other aspects of the architecture.