Complexity Metrics for Component Based Software — A Comparative Study

The Component Based Software Development (CBSD) approach is becoming the trend for software development and is based on developing the software from existing components instead of developing software from the scratch level. Measuring the software complexity is an important aspect during software development as it is an important determinant of software development effort, testing effort, cost, maintainability etc. Interactions/interfaces among components play an important role in contributing complexity to a component based software. In this paper a comparison between different complexity metrics developed by different authors is performed. These metrics are performed by taking different factors to calculate the complexity of the components based software, these factors are instance variables, instance methods, control flow and interface methods etc.. The comparison is performed by taking some quality factors into consideration like maintainability, Integrity, complexity, testability, customizability etc.