Component-Based Software Measurement

Software components and component-based systems can be measured by architectural and functional sizes and complexities. The current approaches to functional measurement, such as function points, do not consider the internal structures of components; while other approaches to architectural measurements, such as the McCabe cyclomatic metric, do not consider I/Os of a system. This chapter introduces a new measurement approach, the equivalent functional size (EFS), to the measurement of both architectural and functional attributes of component-based software systems. The physical meaning of an equivalent functional unit (EFU) of software is explored for the first time, and the basic control structures (BCSs) of software are adopted to model the internal structure and complexity of a component-based software system. This work demonstrates that a software measurement system can be described in a formal and algebraic way. Thus, new measures may be derived based on existing and well-defined measures.