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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Feature Level Complexity and Coupling Analysis in 4GL Systems

Authors : András Kicsi, Viktor Csuvik, László Vidács, Árpád Beszédes, Tibor Gyimóthy

Published in: Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Product metrics are widely used in the maintenance and evolution phase of software development to advise the development team about software quality. Although most of these metrics are defined for mainstream languages, several of them were adapted to fourth generation languages (4GL) as well. Usual concepts like size, complexity and coupling need to be re-interpreted and adapted to program elements defined by these languages. In this paper we take a further step in this process to address product line development in 4GL. Adopting product line architecture is a necessary step to handle challenges of a growing number of similar product variants. The product line adoption process itself is a tedious task where features of the product variants play crucial role. Features represent a higher level of abstraction that are cross-cutting to program elements of 4GL applications. We propose a set of metrics related to features by linking existing program elements to metrics and by relating features with each other. The focus of this study is on complexity and coupling metrics. We provide a metrics based analysis of several variants of a large scale industrial product line written in the Magic XPA 4GL language.

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previous chapter A Framework for Quality Measurement of BPMN Process Models

next chapter A Case Study on Measuring the Size of Microservices

http://www.raincode.com/fglroadmap.html.

http://www.magic-optimizer.com/.

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Title: Feature Level Complexity and Coupling Analysis in 4GL Systems
Authors: András Kicsi
Viktor Csuvik
László Vidács
Árpád Beszédes
Tibor Gyimóthy
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2018
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95173-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-95174-4

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95174-4_35

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