An Approach to Measure the Quality of Software Architectures
from UML Specifications
Ahmed Hassan, Walid Rabie AbdelMoez, and
Hany H. Ammar
Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering,
West Virginia University,
Morgantown, WV 26506-6109, USA
{hassan, rabie, ammar }@csee.wvu.edu
Abstract
As object-oriented analysis and design techniques become widely used, the
demand on assessing the quality of object-oriented designs substantially
increase. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is emerging as an industry
standard for object-oriented architecture specification . Currently there is a need
for measurement support for dynamic aspects from UML diagrams. Concepts like
use cases, scenarios, actions and events are not only used to discover the relevant
domain objects, but also to model the interactions between these objects (e.g.
in collaboration diagram), and thus to shape the overall architecture of the
system. This paper addresses the problem of measuring the quality of objectoriented architectures using dynamic metrics. We present a metrics suite to
measure the quality of design at an early development phase. The suite consists
of dynamic complexity and object coupling based on measures from UML
architectural specification diagrams.