An introduction of new UML design metrics for Web applications

Abstract

Many World Wide Web applications incorporate important business assets and offer a convenient way for businesses to promote their services through the Internet. Many of these web applications evolved from simple HTML pages to complex applications which are difficult to maintain. In order to control the maintenance of web applications quantitative metrics and models for predicting web applications’ maintainability must be used. This paper introduces new design metrics for measuring the maintainability of web applications from class diagrams. The metrics are based on Web Application Extension (WAE) for UML and will measure the following design attributes: size, complexity, coupling and reusability. The paper provides a classification of the metrics based on the measurement structure proposed by Kitchenham for theoretical metrics validation. In addition to that, an exploratory experiment at the university of Illinois is carried out in order to show the relationship between the metrics and understandability and modifiability time