Open AccessMeasuring stability of object‐oriented software architectures
Author(s) -
Ebad Shouki A.,
Ahmed Moataz Aly
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
iet software
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.305
H-Index - 43
eISSN - 1751-8814
pISSN - 1751-8806
DOI - 10.1049/iet-sen.2014.0017
Subject(s) - object oriented programming , computer science , software , object (grammar) , software engineering , programming language , artificial intelligence
Software architectural stability reflects the capability of software to evolve while preserving its architecture. Stability in this context means preserving cross‐architectural components communications and structural relationships unchanged. It is recognised that cross‐architectural components changes are costly and should be avoided. In object‐oriented development, class packages form the basic architectural components of large‐scale software systems. There has been a number of architecture stability metrics proposed in the literature. Those metrics mainly measure changes in cross‐components structural relationships and not cross‐components communication. In this study, the authors’ present a new architectural stability metric that measure inter‐package calls. The authors’ theoretically validated ASM through a set of prominent mathematical properties. The authors’ also empirically validated the metric using two open source projects: JHotDraw and abstract window toolkit. Measurements of the ASM were shown to be consistent with the lines of code changes across releases in the two projects.