Measures for assessing dynamic complexity aspects of object-oriented conceptual schemes

Abstract

System developers are increasingly realising that the quality of a system must be ensured in the early stages of the development life cycle. It is in this context that a number of quality frameworks for conceptual schemes have been proposed. However, before the quality of a conceptual schema can be improved, it must be assessed. Accordingly, a number of measure suites have been proposed for measuring quality properties of conceptual schemes. In this paper we focus on one particular quality property, i.e. complexity. This property can be described as the mental burden of the persons that must understand, modify, extend, verify, implement, and reuse conceptual schemes. The proposed complexity measures for conceptual schemes have in common that they only capture the complexity of the static or structural aspects of a conceptual schema. We therefore present a complementary suite of measures that focuses on conceptual schema complexity as seen from a dynamic perspective.