Towards an Analytical Approach to Measure Modularity in Software Architecture Design

Abstract

Modularization is one of the important subjects in the software design area which leads to increasing the level of quality attributes such as maintainability, portability, reusability, interoperability and flexibility. Therefore, measuring the modularity of a designed architecture is a vital issue to obtain software with a high quality level. Moreover, low coupling between modules, high cohesion of a fine-grained module is two major criteria that could lead to more advanced standard design. In this paper, we introduce an analytical method to calculate modularity considering coupling, granularity and cohesion. To assess the comprehensiveness of the proposed method, the degree of modularity is calculated in a case study using two different architectural designs which shows the architecture's desired quality characteristics in designing the software. The assessment implies that our approach offers a holistic, flexible method considering the type of software application.