Measures for Assessing Dynamic Complexity Aspects of Object-Oriented Conceptual Schemes

Abstract

System developers are increasingly realising that the quality of a system must be ensured in the early stages of the development life cycle. It is in this context that a number of quality frameworks for conceptual schemes have been proposed. However, before the quality of a conceptual schema can be improved, it must be assessed. Accordingly, a number of measure suites have been proposed for measuring quality properties of conceptual schemes. In this paper we focus on one particular quality property, i.e. complexity. This property can be described as the mental burden of the persons that must understand, modify, extend, verify, implement, and reuse conceptual schemes. The proposed complexity measures for conceptual schemes have in common that they only capture the complexity of the static or structural aspects of a conceptual schema. We therefore present a complementary suite of measures that focuses on conceptual schema complexity as seen from a dynamic perspective.

The impact of structural complexity on the understandability of UML statechart diagrams

“…This hypothesized relationship between structural complexity and external quality properties like understandability and modifiability has been repeatedly demonstrated [21,22,47,51]. According to Briand et al [12], it is difficult to imagine what could be alternative explanations for these results besides cognitive complexity mediating the effect of structural complexity on quality.…”

“…The development of metrics for diagrams used as behavioural models has been less emphasized. Moreover, the metric proposals for the behavioural type of UML diagrams [14,15,47,54] have not gone beyond the definition step, and no validation has been performed. However, due to the widespread use of some types of behavioural diagrams [7,51], in particular statechart diagrams, there is an interest in controlling also the quality of these diagrams [2,35].…”

Integrating Legal and Physical Dimensions of Urban Environments

“…Various quality evaluation frameworks have been developed such as [35][36][37][38][39]. Among them, Moody [40] developed a conceptual model quality evaluation framework which highlights eight quality factors: completeness, integrity, flexibility, understandability, correctness, simplicity, integration, and implementability.…”

Using Metrics to Predict OO Information Systems Maintainability

“…Our idea is to use metrics presented in section 2.1 and 2.2 to measure the structural complexity of an UML class diagram. From a system theory point of view, a system is called complex if it is composed of many (different types of elements), with many (different types of) (dynamically changing) relationships between them [25]. According to this, we think that the construct validity of our independent variables can thus be considered satisfactory.…”