Component Integration Metrics and Their Evaluation

Software Engineering (SE) has been described as the discipline devoted to the design, development, and use of computer software, covering not only the technical aspects of building software systems, but also management issues develops highly complex software. The crisis in SE, due to the lack of well-defined formal processes, has led to poorly designed products with high maintenance costs and whose behavior becomes unpredictable. Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) is currently a preferred approach to system design to overcome the crisis of SE, since it promotes software re-use, facilitates adaptability and faster system development. A component provides a function or a set of related functions, which forms a reusable program building block that can be combined with other components to form an application. A component with qualities such as, reusability, testability, modularity, complexity, proper to communicate and stability reduces maintenance costs. The components thus integrated, should be able to interoperate so that an operational application that results in reduced maintenance costs can be composed with minimal effort. Metrics are used to measure a component\u27s quality factor and there are no good metrics available to validate their effectiveness, when components are integrated. Currently, the success of projects based on the CBSE methodology relies on experts who assess software components; however, their evaluation process involves parameters that may not be measured in practice. Existing traditional metrics are inappropriate since CBSE is aimed at improving interoperability and re-usability. Size metrics based on lines of code are not applicable as component sizes may not be known a priori. Furthermore, complexities that arise due to varying nature of facets and interfaces are not addressed by traditional metrics. This thesis addresses the evaluation of a series of metrics based on complexity, criticality and dynamic behavior, in order that component integration performance can be assessed. Three suites of metrics defined by various authors have been considered for evaluation so that one could choose the best metrics to measure an integrated environment. A suite of metrics proposed by Narasimhan and Hendradjaya are classified based on the attributes of: complexity, criticality and dynamic aspects. These metrics use graph-based connectivity to represent a system of integrated components. While the complexity metrics consider the packing density of integrated components and the interaction density among the components, criticality metrics reveal the extent of binding within each component in the system. Dynamic metrics have also been collected during the execution of an application and aid the process involved in testing and maintenance. Metric related data sets have been from several benchmark programs using instrumentation programs and key inferences have been obtained; these inferences include a systematic evaluation of quality of the various metrics. Two new metrics have also been provided towards assessing the stability of the application: one metric, namely CRIT instability, calculates the instability of each component, while the second new metric, namely CRIT inheritance,counts the number of components whose children exceeds a threshold value. Both these metrics are useful to assess the stability of the application and, in addition, to determine the components in a given application that needs to be redesigned. Future work will focus on the development of a metric evaluation suite to assess the system\u27s stability as a whole, considering the role of each component in an application

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

Software development: A paradigm for the future

A new paradigm for software development that treats software development as an experimental activity is presented. It provides built-in mechanisms for learning how to develop software better and reusing previous experience in the forms of knowledge, processes, and products. It uses models and measures to aid in the tasks of characterization, evaluation and motivation. An organization scheme is proposed for separating the project-specific focus from the organization's learning and reuse focuses of software development. The implications of this approach for corporations, research and education are discussed and some research activities currently underway at the University of Maryland that support this approach are presented

Towards guidelines for building a business case and gathering evidence of software reference architectures in industry

Background: Software reference architectures are becoming widely adopted by organizations that need to support the design and maintenance of software applications of a shared domain. For organizations that plan to adopt this architecture-centric approach, it becomes fundamental to know the return on investment and to understand how software reference architectures are designed, maintained, and used. Unfortunately, there is little evidence-based support to help organizations with these challenges. Methods: We have conducted action research in an industry-academia collaboration between the GESSI research group and everis, a multinational IT consulting firm based in Spain. Results: The results from such collaboration are being packaged in order to create guidelines that could be used in similar contexts as the one of everis. The main result of this paper is the construction of empirically-grounded guidelines that support organizations to decide on the adoption of software reference architectures and to gather evidence to improve RA-related practices. Conclusions: The created guidelines could be used by other organizations outside of our industry-academia collaboration. With this goal in mind, we describe the guidelines in detail for their use.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Annotated bibliography of software engineering laboratory literature

An annotated bibliography of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory is given. More than 100 publications are summarized. These publications cover many areas of software engineering and range from research reports to software documentation. This document has been updated and reorganized substantially since the original version (SEL-82-006, November 1982). All materials have been grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: the Software Engineering Laboratory; the Software Engineering Laboratory-software development documents; software tools; software models; software measurement; technology evaluations; Ada technology; and data collection. Subject and author indexes further classify these documents by specific topic and individual author

Annotated bibliography of Software Engineering Laboratory literature

An annotated bibliography of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory is given. More than 100 publications are summarized. These publications cover many areas of software engineering and range from research reports to software documentation. All materials have been grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: The Software Engineering Laboratory; The Software Engineering Laboratory: Software Development Documents; Software Tools; Software Models; Software Measurement; Technology Evaluations; Ada Technology; and Data Collection. Subject and author indexes further classify these documents by specific topic and individual author

Annotated bibliography of software engineering laboratory literature

An annotated bibliography is presented of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory. The bibliography was updated and reorganized substantially since the original version (SEL-82-006, November 1982). All materials were grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: (1) The Software Engineering Laboratory; (2) The Software Engineering Laboratory: Software Development Documents; (3) Software Tools; (4) Software Models; (5) Software Measurement; (6) Technology Evaluations; (7) Ada Technology; and (8) Data Collection. Subject and author indexes further classify these documents by specific topic and individual author