A Metric-Based Approach for Measuring The Conceptual Integrity Of Software Architectures

Abstract

Software architectures evaluation has an important role in the life cycle of software systems. The conceptual integrity is one of the quality attributes which could be closely related to software architectural design. It is the underlying theme or vision that unifies all levels of the system's design. In this paper, a method for measuring the conceptual integrity of software architecture is provided. Conceptual integrity measurement is done in several steps by extracting a graph structure which its nodes are architectural concepts and its edges are relationship between them. The constructed graph is then weighted according to the type of relationship among the architectural concepts. Finally, a metric for evaluating the conceptual integrity from the refined graph is provided.

A Rational Foundation for Software Metrology

“…Although it is widely understood, few attempts have been made to quantify it. A recent example [54] involved making architectural decisions, such as the decision to instantiate a particular design pattern [55], explicit using an ontology, and then computing metrics from the ontology.…”