Tool support for Cascading Style Sheets’ complexity metrics

Abstract

Tools are the fundamental requirement for acceptability of any metrics programme in the software industry. It is observed that majority of the metrics proposed and are available in the literature lack tool support. This is one of the reasons why they are not widely accepted by the practitioners. In order to improve the acceptability of proposed metrics among software engineers that develop Web applications, there is need to automate the process. In this paper, we have developed a tool for computing metrics for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and named it as CSS Analyzer (CSSA). The tool is capable of measuring different metrics, which are the representation of different quality attributes: which include understandability, reliability and maintainability based on some previously proposed metrics. The tool was evaluated by comparing its result on 40 cascading style sheets with results gotten by the manual process of computing the complexities. The results show that the tool computes in far less time when compared to the manual process and is 51.25% accurate.