An Architectural Quality Assessment for Domain-Specific Software

With growing scale and complexity of software-intensive systems, the requirements to evaluating the effects of components on software quality will dramatically increase. Existing quality metrics for software architecture demand users to perform a tedious and high-cost process so that they cannot meet the needs for a rapid, simple and preliminary evaluation. In this paper, a description technique for software architecture is introduced. Through separating the control flow from component, the description technique makes it easy to analyze and evaluate software architecture. Based on the description technique, a quality metric is proposed, which is exploited to preliminarily evaluate the effects of component on the quality of software architecture. Finally, an experiment is given to show the simplicity, usability and effectiveness of the metric.