The question of what to measure pops up very often in our work. It’s not easy to answer, but we give guidance for areas of software engineering. In this blog post, I focus on the area of software architectures.
For the software architectures, there are a few areas that are important:
- Stability of the architecture
- Complexity of the architecture
- and Quality of the architecture
These areas can be quantified with measures of – interface stability, component complexity, technical debt and similar. Based on our work with the companies in Software Center, we realized that these measures are more important than more complex measures like – architecture weight, architecture stability index or architectural debt. The reason is that the simple measures provide an immediate understanding of what can be done to improve the situation.
In our work, we also looked at how to calculate these measures based on open data sets of complexity of automotive software.
If you are interested in the details of how to use the measures, please take a look at Chapter 7 of my book:
- Book: http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319586090
- Chapter 7: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-58610-6_7
- our previous work: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-49421-0_5
