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From Retrospect to Prospect: Assessing Modularity and Stability from Software Architecture
Conference proceeding

From Retrospect to Prospect: Assessing Modularity and Stability from Software Architecture

Kanwarpreet Sethi, Yuanfang Cai, Sunny Wong, Alessandro Garcia, Claudio Sant'Anna and IEEE
2009 JOINT WORKING IEEE/IFIP CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE AND EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE, pp 269-272
01 Jan 2009

Abstract

Computer Science Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture Computer Science, Software Engineering Science & Technology Technology
Architecture-level decisions, directly influenced by environmental factors, are crucial to preserve modularity and stability throughout software development life-cycle. Tradeoffs; of modularization alternatives, such as aspect-oriented vs. object-oriented decompositions, thus need to be assessed from architecture models instead of source code. In this paper, we present a suite of architecture-level metrics, taking external factors that drive software changes into consideration and measuring how well an architecture produces independently substitutable modules. We formalize these metrics using logical models to automate quantitative stability and modularity assessment. We evaluate the metrics using eight aspect-oriented and object-oriented releases of a software product-line architecture, driven by a series of heterogeneous changes. By contrasting with an implementation-level analysis, we observe that these metrics can effectively reveal which modularization alternative generates more stable, modular design from high-level models.

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41 citations in Scopus

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Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
Computer Science, Software Engineering
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