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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; [email protected]; [email protected]
Georges Louis
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Informatique, Image, Interaction (L3i), Université de La Rochelle, France; [email protected]; [email protected]
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Abstract

Among several alternative viewpoints for building software quality metrics, evaluating the consistency between different modelsin a software specification or implementation appears to be fruitful.An obvious difficulty is that different models are usually expressedby means of different concepts, and then, confronting heterogeneousrepresentations is not straightforward.In this paper, we propose a solution for measuring theconsistency between the architecture and the communication models.After some sensible transformations, the information about bothmodels are captured trough hierarchical representations. We defineand discuss a similarity measure between hierarchies, that eventuallyfounds the software metric we propose. Lastly, we investigate how toscale and interpret the metric values and give an application examplewith SDL.

Keywords

Software metricssoftware architecture modelcommunicationmodelhierarchical 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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