Empirical evaluation and critical review of complexity metrics for software components

Component-based development has become a highly widespread approach for application development. Various metrics have been developed by researchers for improving the quality of software components as traditional software products and process metrics are neither suitable nor sufficient in measuring the complexity of these components. The paper proposes a complexity metric for components based on the different constituents of the components, like inheritance of classes, methods and attributes. This metric is applied to various JavaBean components for empirical evaluation. Further, a correlation study has been conducted for this metric with another metric called Rate of Component Customizability (RCC), available in the literature. The study conducted shows the negative correlation between the two which confirms the assumption that high complexity of the components leads to the high cost of maintainability.