Evaluation of a Suite of Metrics for Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE)

Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) has shown significant prospects in rapid production of large software systems with enhanced quality, and emphasis on decomposition of the engineered systems into functional or logical components with well-defined interfaces used for communication across the components. In this paper, a series of metrics proposed by various researchers have been analyzed, evaluated and benchmarked using several large-scale publicly available software systems. A systematic analysis of the values for various metrics has been carried out and several key inferences have been drawn from them. A number of useful conclusions have been drawn from various metrics evaluations, which include inferences on complexity, reusability, testability, modularity and stability of the underlying components. The inferences are argued to be beneficial for CBSE-based software development, integration and maintenance.