Software engineering metrics and models
Software engineering metrics and models
An Empirical Study of Software Metrics
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The Use of Software Complexity Metrics in Software Maintenance
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Controlled Expeniment on the Impact of Software Structure on Maintainability
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An introduction to Estelle: a specification language for distributed systems
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems - Special Issue: Protocol Specification and Testing
Towards Complexity Metrics for Ada Tasking
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
An Integrated Life-Cycle Model for Software Maintenance
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Estelle development toolset (EDT)
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems
Complexity measures for concurrent programs based on information-theoretic metrics
Information Processing Letters
Software complexity and maintenance costs
Communications of the ACM
The PET and DINGO tools for deriving distributed implementations from Estelle
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems - Special issue on tools for FDTs
A software complexity model of object-oriented systems
Decision Support Systems - Special issue on information technologies and systems
Software metrics (2nd ed.): a rigorous and practical approach
Software metrics (2nd ed.): a rigorous and practical approach
Measuring the readability and maintainability of hyperdocuments
Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice
On measuring the complexity of an Estelle specification
Journal of Systems and Software
Deriving complexity information from a formal communication protocol specification
Software—Practice & Experience
Complexity Measures for Rule-Based Programs
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
NIST Integrated Tool Set for Estelle
FORTE '90 Proceedings of the IFIP TC6/WG6.1 Third International Conference on Formal Description Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols: Formal Description Techniques, III
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
COMPSAC '04 Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference - Volume 01
A complexity measure for UML component-based system specification
Software—Practice & Experience
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
It is difficult to measure the maintainability of a software system early in the development life cycle from its requirement descriptions written in a natural language because informal specifications cannot be analyzed. With the uses of Formal Description Techniques (FDTs) in the communication protocol area since the mid-1980s, avenues have been opened up for a system to be analyzed early in the specification phase. Quantitative measures on its maintainability can then be extracted from such a formal specification, so that we can develop easily maintainable communication software systems and further reduce the increasingly high cost of software maintenance. To date, there is hardly any work done on measuring the maintainability of a system early in its specification phase. This paper presents a method for measuring the maintainability of a communication by using maintainability metrics derived from its formal specification written in Estelle. The methodology for building the Estelle maintainability metrics hierarchy is presented. We have also developed an automated tool, called PSAMS, to automate the calculation of the maintainability indices. We also found that there is a significant correlation between the specification metrics proposed and the widely adopted implementation metrics, thus demonstrating that our proposed metrics are a reliable means of measuring the maintainability of a communication protocol early in the specification phase.