Complexity measurements of the inter-domain management system design

Current use of software metrics in the industry focuses on the cost and effort estimation, while some research was carried out in the direction of their use as fault indicators. Empirical studies in software measurement are scarce, especially in the realm of object-oriented metrics, while there is no record of management system assessment using these metrics. We discuss an approach to using established object-oriented software metrics as complexity/coupling and thus risk indicators early in the system development lifecycle. Further, we subject a medium-scale inter-domain network and service management system, developed in UML, to the metric assessment, and present an analysis of these measurements. This system was developed in a European Commission-sponsored ACTS research project - TRUMPET. Results indicate that the highest level of complexity, and thus also risk, is exhibited at major interconnection points between autonomous management domains. Moreover, the results imply a strong ordinal correlation between the metrics.