Design Measures for Distributed Information Systems: an Empirical Evaluation

Due to the different nature of the available dynamic interactions between components afforded by some middleware infrastructure, distributed information systems (DIS) behave differently from traditional centralized ones. This results in a different view of their quality attributes, which require specifically customized measures for accurate estimation. In previous work we proposed and theoretically validated design measures purposely defined for DIS. In this paper we investigate the relevance of the newly proposed measures to estimate one of the quality attributes of interest for DIS. To this end, we have applied the proposed measures to a proof-of-concept DIS in the context of an Australian university, for the ultimate purpose of efficiency estimation. The research concludes that most of the proposed measures are indeed correlated to the efficiency and are suitable to be used as part of estimation models.