| The study of software architectures is gaining importance due to its role in various aspects of software engineering like product line engineering, component based software engineering and other emerging paradigms. Various architectural attributes including error propagation, change propagation, requirements propagation provide a wealth of information about software architectures.;For the past few years, researchers at West Virginia University and New Jersey Institute of Technology have been working on the project, Software Architectural level metrics. As the result of which, various software metrics have been proposed to analyze and evaluate the design qualities of software architectures. The goal of this research is to develop a web based environment for Software Architecture Metrics.;Various algorithms for computing Error propagation, change propagation and size of change on UMLRT models have been designed and implemented as part of this research work. These algorithms have been integrated into the web based tool. In this research, we also show that change propagation probability (CP) is helpful and effective in assessing the design quality of software architectures. We experiment with two different architectures (one that employs design patterns versus one that does not) for the same application. We also analyze and compare change propagation metric with respect to other coupling-based metrics. |
