Entropy measure of XML schema document complexity metric

Design of eXtensible Markup Language schema document (XSD) plays an extremely important role in software development process and needs to be quantified for ease of reusability and flexibility. In this paper, Entropy Measure of Complexity (EMC) metric is proposed. The EMC metric measures how element and attribute types of XSD are inheritance to one another. More EMC value leads to greater design complexity. On the other hand, greater complexity values imply that many types of elements and attributes in XSD may be reused and flexible. It is demonstrated with examples and validated theoretically and empirically through actual test cases.