Measuring Z specifications
Fangjun Wu, Tong Yi · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2004
Software metrics are useful quantitative indicators to assess and predict software quality attributes; a commonly measured attribute is software complexity. The main drawbacks are: they can only be calculated after a major development effort has been committed to produce the source codes; they cannot provide early feedback during the specification phase; and subsequently it is expensive to make changes to the system, if so indicated by the metrics. To date, there is hardly any work done on measuring the complexity of a system early in its specification phase. In this paper, we describe how the complexity of a Z specification can be measured. We also found that there is a significant correlation between the specification metrics proposed and the widely adopted OO metrics, thus demonstrating that our proposed metrics are a reliable means of measuring the system early in the specification phase.