Metrics for software architecture: a case study in the telecommunication domain

Due to the ever increasing size and complexity of industrial software products, the issue of the design and architecture level metrics has received considerable attention. We propose some new metrics, in addition to employing some existing metrics, to understand their effects on four important quality attributes of software architectures: interoperability, reusability, reliability and maintainability. We also propose a simple 'concept selection' methodology to assess these quality attributes using the raw metrics. Data from a very large-scale telecommunications software product and its changing software qualities are measured as the software architecture evolves during two releases of the product. Interesting questions arise as to how to determine the overall quality of an evolving product.