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Measuring structural complexity for class diagrams: an information theory approach

Published: 13 March 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In the object-oriented analysis phase, class diagrams are used to represent the static structure of objects in a system and the kinds of static relationships that exist among them, which lay the foundation for all later design and development. Therefore, their complexity has a significant impact on the quality of the ultimate system. For quantifying the structural complexity of a class diagram precisely, this paper presents a structural complexity model called weighted class dependence graph (WCDG), in which almost all relationships among classes/interfaces that can be found during the object-oriented analysis phase are represented and their degrees are characterized by weights. Based on the WCDG, this paper depicts the occurrence of the outgoing and incoming edges by two discrete random variables and then uses entropy distance to derive a novel structural complexity measure called EDC. We believe that EDC is flexible and could evaluate the structural complexity of class diagrams more objectively.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing
March 2005
1814 pages
ISBN:1581139640
DOI:10.1145/1066677
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 March 2005

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Author Tags

  1. class diagrams
  2. dependence
  3. entropy distance
  4. measure
  5. structural complexity

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SAC05
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SAC05: The 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
March 13 - 17, 2005
New Mexico, Santa Fe

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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  • (2018)A complexity metric for object-oriented softwareInternational Journal of Computers and Applications10.1080/1206212X.2018.1478194(1-6)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
  • (2014)Deriving Complexity Metric based on Use Case Diagram and its validation2014 IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT)10.1109/ISSPIT.2014.7300571(000102-000107)Online publication date: Dec-2014
  • (2013)The Architecture Complexity Research Based on Multi-View DescriptionAdvanced Materials Research10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.791-793.1463791-793(1463-1467)Online publication date: Sep-2013
  • (2012)Estimating the Quality of an Object-Oriented Software System Using Graph AlgorithmsInternational Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering10.7763/IJCEE.2012.V4.535(467-470)Online publication date: 2012

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