The Design Metric Software Design Analyzer

The Design Metrics research team has been evaluating design documentation and calculating a number of design metrics. Design metrics are obtained from the artifacts available in the design stage of the software life cycle. Until recently the Design Metrics research team has hand calculated and recorded these metrics. A Software Design Analyzer (SDA) has been written to automate some of these calculations. The SDA recognizes the design elements of a software system (i.e., structure charts or DFDs), searches for the relevant information in the design in order to calculate the metrics, and deposits the information into a repository for later reference. Automatically retrieving the design information from a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool storehouse allows the research team to concentrate on the formulation, calibration and analysis of the design metrics. The incorporation of CASE technology provides an existing platform for the transfer of the design metrics into industry. The SDA is the technical support required to calculate and analyze metrics on large-scale projects, a task which would be impossible to accomplish by manual efforts. Integration of the SDA The SDA is one component of a larger system that is depicted in Figure 1. The initial input to this system is a specific CASE tool representation of a design. This eXternal Representation (XR) is the organizational format of the graphical and textual design information stored by the CASE tool. The XR is supplied as input to the Transformation Generator (TG) [CABR89b] which was one of the products of the Design Format Transformation Project funded by SERC. The TG transforms the XR design format into an Interface Description Language (IDL) [SNOD89] Internal Representation (IR) which becomes the populated IDL.IR [CABR89a]. >From a given instantiated IR, the SDA retrieves the IDL generic design structure, extracts the design primitives, performs the calculations, produces a metrics report and populates a metric information repository. The existing system operates under the UNIX environment. Figure 1. The SDA in a typical system configuration