Component metrics to measure component quality

Abstract

Recently, component-based software development is getting accepted in industry as a new effective software development paradigm. Since the introduction of component-based software engineering (CBSE) in later 90's, the CBSD research has focused largely on component modeling, methodology, architecture and component platform. However, as the number of components available on the market increases, it becomes more important to devise metrics to quantify the various characteristics of components. In this paper, we propose metrics for measuring the complexity, customizability, and reusability of software components. Complexity metric can be used to evaluate the complexity of components. Customizability is used to measure how efficiently and widely the components can be customized for organization specific requirement. Reusability can be used to measure the degree of features that are reused in building applications. We expect that these metrics can be effectively used to quantify the characteristics of components.