Software Design Metrics: What You Need to Know
Software design is known as a process of developing specific software solutions and solving problems associated with it. No wonder, this procedure requires a well-thought step-by-step approach that may influence the efficacy of software development and opportune completion of all related tasks. As a rule, any decision is affected by the applicable development environment.
This is true when you have to devise an immediate solution or apply proven and trustworthy design patterns and frameworks. Depending on the accessibility of software design technology, the whole process may be subdivided in to two types, namely platform-oriented and platform-independent.
As far as there are lots of issues to be considered when designing any software, there is a need to come up to this process smartly. Sometimes there is a necessity to identify and analyze design problems and find proper way outs of such situations. This is exactly where software design metrics may come in handy. They are generally used to measure and improve the quality of applied patterns. Such metrics or indicators measure specifications and properties of these designs, so the main goal of their implementation is obtaining quantifiable, reliable and reproducible results that may be further used in budget planning, software optimization, estimation of related expenses etc. Apart from this, metrics are highly helpful when it comes to the estimation of certain software aspects and providing a nice insight into this process or the final product. Thus, indicators we are talking about are associated with specific design aspects, which make them a powerful tool in adopting decisions that affect the design and quality of software.
The process of software development is quite painstaking, so the selection of the most suitable metrics may occasionally pose problems. This is especially true when it comes to the analysis and measurement of corresponding quantities and qualities of a particular piece of software. Another complication is identification of the very essence of metrics and their role in the measurement process.
Development and implementation of software metrics means a lot when there is a necessity to choose among a few patterns or designs, which offer solution to one and the same problem with regard to quality aspects. This helps identify what parts of a particular patter require improvement for better software performance. The whole process is analyzed from the point of view of 4 perspectives. Thus, “quality perspective” is basically applied to assess the compatibility, reliability, security related capacity as well as other features associated with quality enhancement. Key performance indicators measured within the “Logical size and complexity” category deal with average software development time and cyclamate intricacy, while KPIs related to the “Exception handling and operations” group represent such metrics as amount of runtime and failure fraction exceptions, total amount of operations as well as that of manually created exclusions. “Design efforts” metrics, in their turn, may be calculated by means of fractioning the overall amount of applied effort, which is represented by such indicators as learning, creation, review and, of course, testing and improvement.