The Quality of Programs Conceived by Object Enhanced Time Petri Nets

摘要

Software developers use metrics to estimate the software quality before the development stage to impact early decision making at the requirement stage, development quantification, operation, and software maintenance. These metrics give knowledge of a certain attribute of the software system and thus helps to evaluate it objectively and gives opportunities for software improvement and making plans for modifications. This research aims to find some methods to assist the application developer during the specification and design phases to get higher quality programs. The application development is supposed to be performed using the OETPN based modeling method. The newly proposed metrics are: Structural Complexity (number of arcs and the number of modules), Hierarchical Complexity (if one OETPN module is created by another), Unstructuredness of OETPN Models (which is based on the number of modules, cycles and decision places), Branching Complexity (which is computed according to the reachability graph), Decision Vertex (which is computed based on the decision node of the execution graph), and the Net Complexity is the summation of all the previous complexities. The token complexity consists of the Complexity of guard conditions (using Halsted’s method) and the complexity of token classes (using the Chidamber and Kemerer and Lorenz and Kidd metrics suites). All of these metrics are presented with examples. The proposed assessment methods can be used for quality evaluation of implemented applications if the OETPN models are constructed.