EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON SIMILARITY METRICS FOR SOFTWARE COMPONENT INTERFACES

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kratz, Benedikt | Reussner, Ralf | van den Heuvel, Willem-Jan

Affiliations: Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands | Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany | Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Abstract: In this article we define metrics for measuring component interface similarity. These metrics were applied in an empirical study investigating the relationship between the functionality and the interfaces of software components. The main contributions of this article are: (i) the introduction of software component interface refactorings, i.e., transformations working on IDL-style (i.e., signature-list based) component interfaces. These refactorings are used to define a similarity metric for signature-list based component interfaces, (ii) the definition of efficiently computable metrics measuring the similarity of software component protocols (i.e., valid call sequences to component services), and, (iii) the discussion of first insights from the metrics' application in the context of our empirical study.

Keywords: software component interface design, component interoperability, empirical research in software engineering

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 1-17, 2004