Information theoretic metrics for software architectures

Abstract

Because it codifies best practices, and because it supports various forms of software reuse, the discipline of software architecture is emerging as an important branch of software engineering research and practice. Because architectural-level decisions are prone to have a profound impact on finished software products, it is important to apprehend their quality attributes and to quantify them (as much as possible). In this paper, we discuss an information-theoretic approach to the definition and validation of architectural metrics, and illustrate our approach on a sample example.