Together with Delft Technical University, the Software Improvement Group has performed an empirical study to investigate how the analyzability of implemented software architectures can be quantified. The result of this study is a new metric called 'Component Balance'. Additionally, the study illustrates the usefulness of this metric in different evaluation scenarios and validates the values of the metric against the opinion of experts.

By Eric Bouwers (SIG/TU Delft), Jose Pedro Correia (SIG), Arie van Deursen (TU Delft), Joost Visser (SIG)
To be published at: 9th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA), 20-24 June 2011

 

Abstract: The decomposition of a software system into components is a major decision in any software architecture, having a strong influence on many of its quality aspects. A system's analyzability, in particular, is influenced by its decomposition into components. But into how many components should a system be decomposed to achieve optimal analyzability? And how should the elements of the system be distributed over those components? 

In this paper, we set out to find answers to these questions with the support of a large repository of industrial and open source software systems. Based on our findings, we designed a metric which we call Component Balance. In a case study we show that the metric provides pertinent results in various evaluation scenarios. In addition, we report on an empirical study that demonstrates that the metric is strongly correlated with ratings for analyzability as given by experts.

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