Variations on using propagation cost to measure architecture modifiability properties

Robert L. Nord, Ipek Ozkaya, Raghvinder S. Sangwan, Julien Delange, Marco González, Philippe Kruchten

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Tools available for measuring the modifiability or impact of change of a system through its architecture typically use structural metrics. These metrics take into account dependencies among the different elements of a system. However, they fail to capture the semantics of an architectural transformation necessary to control the complexity and cost of making changes. To highlight such limitations, this paper presents a study where we applied a representative structural metric, called 'propagation cost', to archetypical architectural transformations known to affect system modifiability such as rearchitecting a tightly coupled system to a layered pattern. We observe that in its original form the propagation cost metric does not provide consistent indications of architecture health. Enhancing this metric based on the semantics of the architectural pattern and tactics used in the transformation show improvements. Our results demonstrate that these enhancements detect modifiability properties that are not detectable by the propagation cost metric.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages400-403
Number of pages4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2013 - Eindhoven, Netherlands
Duration: Sep 22 2013Sep 28 2013

Other

Other29th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM 2013
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityEindhoven
Period9/22/139/28/13

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

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