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A metric for evaluating software architecture and communication models consistency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2005

Jean-Yves Lafaye  and
Georges Louis
Jean-Yves Lafaye
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Informatique, Image, Interaction (L3i), Université de La Rochelle, France; jylafaye@univ-lr.fr; glouis@univ-lr.fr
Georges Louis
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Informatique, Image, Interaction (L3i), Université de La Rochelle, France; jylafaye@univ-lr.fr; glouis@univ-lr.fr
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Abstract

Among several alternative viewpoints for building software quality metrics, evaluating the consistency between different models in a software specification or implementation appears to be fruitful. An obvious difficulty is that different models are usually expressed by means of different concepts, and then, confronting heterogeneous representations is not straightforward. In this paper, we propose a solution for measuring the consistency between the architecture and the communication models. After some sensible transformations, the information about both models are captured trough hierarchical representations. We define and discuss a similarity measure between hierarchies, that eventually founds the software metric we propose. Lastly, we investigate how to scale and interpret the metric values and give an application example with SDL.

Keywords

Software metricssoftware architecture modelcommunication modelhierarchical clusteringmodel consistencySDL
Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 361 - 390
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, 2005

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