Unified Modeling Language Quantitative Measures Based on a Behavioural Model

Abstract

Behavioral diagrams in Unified Modeling Language reflect the interaction between system components and give a comprehensive description and visualization of the system during the design phase. One of the most important behavioral diagrams is the sequence diagram which describes the chronological sequence of events between the components of the system. The process of extracting information and metrics from a sequence diagram is time-consuming so creating a special tool to help developers obtain information from the sequence diagram has become necessary because of the great advantages and ease it provides. This paper aims to build a tool that extracts information from the sequence diagram, creates a table that includes this information, and then calculates three categories of metrics related to the sequence diagram which are size, complexity, and level of detail. These categories include 15 metrics to give quantitative values that indicate software quality which is used to estimate the schedule, cost, effort, and other resources in the software development process. As a case study, the hotel reservation system is adopted and constructed as two versions of sequence diagrams for comparison purposes. The results showed a quantitative measurement of small and unnoticeable differences between the two diagrams.

Keywords

• sequence diagram
• complexity
• software size
• level of detail
• software metrics