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Issue RAIRO-Theor. Inf. Appl.
Volume 39, Number 2, April-June 2005
Page(s) 361 - 390
DOI 10.1051/ita:2005023

Theoret. Informatics Appl. 39, 361-390 (2005)
DOI: 10.1051/ita:2005023

A metric for evaluating software architecture and communication models consistency

Jean-Yves Lafaye and Georges Louis

Laboratoire Informatique, Image, Interaction (L3i), Université de La Rochelle, France; jylafaye@univ-lr.fr; glouis@univ-lr.fr


(Received March 4, 2003. Accepted February 20, 2004.)

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.


Mathematics Subject Classification. 68N30.

Key words: Software metrics -- software architecture model -- communication model -- hierarchical clustering -- model consistency -- SDL


© EDP Sciences 2005


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