Conference proceeding
Decoupling Level: A New Metric for Architectural Maintenance Complexity
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) Conference Proceedings, 499
01 Jan 2016
Abstract
Conference Title: 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) Conference Start Date: 2016, May 14 Conference End Date: 2016, May 22 Conference Location: Austin, TX, USA Despite decades of research on software metrics, we still cannot reliably measure if one design is more maintainable than another. Software managers and architects need to understand whether their software architecture is "good enough", whether it is decaying over time and, if so, by how much. In this paper, we contribute a new architecture maintainability metric---Decoupling Level (DL)---derived from Baldwin andClark's option theory. Instead of measuring how coupled an architecture is, we measure how well the software can be decoupled into small and independently replaceable modules. We measured the DL for 108 open source projects and 21 industrial projects, each of which has multiple releases. Our main result shows that the larger the DL, the better thearchitecture. By "better" we mean: the more likely bugs and changes can be localized and separated, and the more likely that developers can make changes independently. The DL metric also opens the possibility of quantifying canonical principles of single responsibility and separation of concerns, aiding cross-project comparison and architecture decay monitoring.
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Details
- Title
- Decoupling Level: A New Metric for Architectural Maintenance Complexity
- Creators
- Ran MoYuanfang CaiRick KazmanLu XiaoQiong Feng
- Publication Details
- The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) Conference Proceedings, 499
- Publisher
- The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Computer Science (Computing)
- Identifiers
- 991019170575304721