Complexity metrics for formally specified business requirements

According to the Zachman framework for system architecture, business requirements and user information requirements should be separately modelled to enhance the maintainability and adaptability of the information systems and to improve the flexibility of the system development process. The measurement of business requirements is largely an unexplored field since requirements specification measures (e.g., function points) have focused almost exclusively on user information requirements. However, as a problem domain model, business requirements are worth measuring. In this paper a measurement model is presented that builds upon a formal specification language. The model allows to define meaningful viewpoints on business requirements complexity. Using a Measure Theoretic approach, a number of complexity measures are defined in an attempt to extent the life cycle coverage of software measurement to the business requirements specification phase.

[1]  Monique Snoeck,et al.  Existence dependency: conceptual modelling by contract , 1996 .

[2]  F. Roberts Measurement Theory with Applications to Decisionmaking, Utility, and the Social Sciences: Measurement Theory , 1984 .

[3]  Kaizhong Zhang,et al.  Simple Fast Algorithms for the Editing Distance Between Trees and Related Problems , 1989, SIAM J. Comput..

[4]  Horst Zuse,et al.  Foundations of object-oriented software measures , 1996, Proceedings of the 3rd International Software Metrics Symposium.

[5]  Geert Poels,et al.  Formal software measurements for object-oriented business models , 1996 .

[6]  Sandro Morasca,et al.  Property-Based Software Engineering Measurement , 1996, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[7]  De Barra Introduction to Measure Theory , 1974 .

[8]  Charles R. Symons,et al.  Function Point Analysis: Difficulties and Improvements , 1988, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[9]  Norman E. Fenton,et al.  Software Metrics: A Rigorous Approach , 1991 .

[10]  Dar-Biau Liu,et al.  Metrics for requirements engineering , 1995, J. Syst. Softw..

[11]  G. Dedene,et al.  M.E.R.O.DE.: a model-driven entity-relationship object-oriented Development method , 1994, SOEN.

[12]  John E. Gaffney,et al.  Software Function, Source Lines of Code, and Development Effort Prediction: A Software Science Validation , 1983, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[13]  Shari Lawrence Pfleeger,et al.  Towards a Framework for Software Measurement Validation , 1995, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[14]  B. John Oommen,et al.  Numerical Similarity and Dissimilarity Measures Between Two Trees , 1996, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[15]  John A. Zachman,et al.  A Framework for Information Systems Architecture , 1987, IBM Syst. J..