A Review of Component Coupling Metrics for Component-Based Development

The use of component-based software engineering (CBSE) is growing in popularity among the software engineering community and it has been successfully applied in many engineering domains. Component quality evaluations by adequate metrics are needed for large scale project. However, the software quality evaluation should also be performed on component assembly since the overall quality of the CBSE is more important. In this paper, we briefly survey the traditional software metrics and then discuss metrics for both the individual component and their assembly between the components. We then suggest a formal direct and an indirect component coupling metric.