A Complexity Metric for Web Applications Based on the Entropy Theory

Web applications are becoming more and more important with the rapid increase in the web environment. The maintenance of web applications is also one of the main problems in that area. Traditional maintenance approach can no longer be applied to web applications, because of the specific characteristics of web applications. In this paper, a complexity measure for web application, WCOX, is proposed. It is related to the maintenance efforts. WCOX is defined using the entropy theory and a web model extracted by static analysis. The entropy of software is regarded as an average information quantity of the software and it means the aging and degradation of the software. Most of the existing web complexity measures are simply based on count, which means that they only show limited viewpoints of a system. Since WCOX is concerned with an information quantity and understandability, it not only represents the structural complexity, but can also be used as a practical maintenance indicator. Experimental results demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed measure.