Abstract— Software design is very important stage in software
engineering since it lies in the middle of the software development
life cycle and costs can be reduced if corrections or improvements
made in design phase. Some of the existing CASE tools do not
have the ability to correct or improve software design like EA
v7.5.
The present study aims to construct a CASE tool that helps
software engineers in design phase by assessing or evaluating the
quality of that design using object oriented design metrics, use
the developed CASE tool as add-in to work inside Enterprise
Architect since it has no support for design metrics. So, this
paper may be considered as an evolvement of such a well-known
CASE tool like the Enterprise Architect
In this paper, three tools are developed. First, is “K Design
Metrics tool (KDM)” as an add-in that works inside Enterprise
Architect (EA) v7.5 which is a well-known, powerful CASE
(Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool. KDM tool takes
the XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) document for the UML
class diagram exported by EA as input, processes it, calculates
and visualize metrics, provides recommendations about design
naming conventions and exports metrics as XML (Extensible
Markup Language) document in order to communicate with
other tools namely KRS (K Reporting Service) and KDB (K
Database).
A Second tool is K Reporting Service (KRS) “KRS” which takes
XML document generated by KDM tool as input, parses it and
gives a report. The report helps the project manager or the team
leader to monitor the progress and to document the metrics.
Hence KRS tool is integrated with Enterprise Architect.
Lastly, K Database “KDB” which takes the same XML document
generated by KDM tool as input, parses it and stores metrics in
the database to be used as a historical data. KDB tool is also
integrated with Enterprise Architect.
Two object oriented design metrics models are used, namely
MOOD (Metrics for Object Oriented Design) which measures
Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism and Coupling, and
MEMOOD (Maintainability Estimation Model for Object
Oriented software in Design phase) which measures
Understandability, Modifiability and Maintainability. Both
models are validated theoretically and empirically. These
measurements allow designers to access the software early in
process, make changes that will reduce complexity and improve
the design.
All three tools were developed using C# programming language
with the aid of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 as integrated
development environment under Windows 7 operating system
with minimum 4 GB of RAM and Core-i3 of CPU.
تاريخ النشر
02/07/2015
الناشر
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security (IJCSIS)
خليل احمد ابراهيم | Khalil Ahmed Ibrahim | 1287