A Method for Assessing Maintainability of Software Architectural Styles in Self-healing Systems by Measuring Coupling and Cohesion

In this article, our aim is to quantify the impact of three reference architectural styles, i.e. Aspect-peer-to-peer, Aggregator-escalator-peer, and Chain-of-configurators on the maintainability attribute in self-healing systems. To do so, we used metrics of coupling and cohesion. To show the effectiveness of our method, we applied it to the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) as a case study. Our findings showed the Chain-of-configurators architectural style, in comparison with two other styles, had the least (best) coupling and the most (best) cohesion. In fact, it was the best style from the maintainability point of view.