UML Based Quantitative Software Architecture Evaluation
Jinhua Li · Journal of Chinese Computer Systems · 2007
The architecture of a software system is a critical artifact in the software development and should be evaluated as early as possible. Recent efforts to software architecture evaluation are concentrated on scenario-based methods which are qualitative, subjective and not needed special architecture description languages. This paper studies an approach to quantitative software architecture evaluation based on UML models and measurement. UML is a visual modeling language with well-formed syntax and semantics, and uniformly used in various development stages. By utilization of these features three types of metrics for UML models are proposed. They measure the amount of information, visual effect and connectivity between modeling elements in different UML diagrams. The application of these metrics in evaluating software architecture qualities such as system scale, complexity and structural characteristics is discussed.