Measuring the quality of interfaces using source code entropy

Abstract

Global enterprises face an increasingly high complexity of software systems. Although size and complexity are two different aspects of a software system, traditionally, various size metrics have been established to indicate their complexity. In fact, many developed software metrics correlate with the number of lines of code. Moreover, a combination of multiple metrics collected on bottom layers into one comprehensible and meaningful indicator for an entire system is not a trivial task. This paper proposes a novel interpretation of an entropy-based metric to assess the design of a software system in terms of interface quality and understandability. The proposed metric is independent of the system size and delivers one single value eliminating the unnecessary aggregation step. Further, an industrial case study has been conducted to illustrate the usefulness of this metric.

Software semantic metrics: A Survey

“…Oleksandr et.al. [29] Proposes a novel interpretation of an entropybased metric to assess the design of a software system in terms of interface quality and understandability. The research in this area is still too young.…”

A measurement framework for software product maturity assessment

“…Count the number of file operations including open, read, write and close" Absolute EL Count the number of external functions, libraries and files linked" Absolute VE 57 "Count the number of variables declaration" Absolute EditedFunctionCC (C C) 58 "The summation of the cyclomatic complexity (CC) for functions edited during code change"Absolute Fan-in + fan-out59 "Obtained from fan-in + fan-out" Absolute ZIP-coefficient of compression (ZCC)60 "The ratio of size of ZIP archive to size of project" Ratio Number of children (NOC)56 "Number of immediate subclasses subordinated to a class in the class hierarchy" Absolute (*) Absolute measure is a NUMBER, and ratio measure is a PERCENTAGE.…”