Measuring the Quality of Interfaces Using Source Code Entropy
Global enterprises face an increasingly high complexity of software systems. Although size and complexity are two different aspects of a software system,traditionally,various size metrics have been established to indicate their complexity. In fact,many developed software metrics correlate with the number of lines of code. Moreover,a combination of multiple metrics collected on bottom layers into one comprehensible and meaningful indicator for an entire system is not a trivial task. This paper proposes a novel interpretation of an entropy-based metric to assess the design of a software system in terms of interface quality and understandability. The proposed metric is independent of the system size and delivers one single value eliminating the unnecessary aggregation step. Further,an industrial case study has been conducted to illustrate the usefulness of this metric.
Source code complezity Quality of interfaces Entropy Software understandability
Oleksandr Panchenko Stephan H.Mueller Alexander Zeier Hasso Plattner
Institute for Software Systems Engineering P.O.Box 900460,14440 Potsdam,Germany
国际会议
北京
英文
1108-1111
2009-10-21（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）