A metrics suite for measuring quality characteristics of javabeans components

In component-based software development, it is necessary to measure the quality of components before they are built into the system in order to ensure the high quality of the entire system. However, in application development with component reuse, it is difficult to use conventional metrics because the source codes of components cannot be obtained, and these metrics require analysis of source codes. Moreover, conventional techniques do not cover the whole of quality characteristics. In this paper, we propose a suite of metrics for measuring quality of JavaBeans components based on limited information that can be obtained from the outside of components without any source codes. Our suite consists of 21 metrics, which are associated with quality characteristics based on the ISO9126 quality model. Our suite utilizes the qualitative evaluation data available on WWW to empirically identify effective metrics, and to derive a reference value (threshold) for each metric. As a result of evaluation experiments, it is found our suite can be used to effectively identify black-box components with high quality. Moreover we confirmed that our suite can form a systematic framework for component quality metrics that includes conventional metrics and newly defined metrics.