A New Approach to the Quantitative Measurement of Software Flexibility

Software flexibility is the ease with which a software system can be modified for use in applications or environments other than those for which it was specifically designed. Software flexibility is not an absolute term. It is an important aspect of software quality. Quantifying software flexibility is increasingly becoming necessary. We have recently proposed a new approach (referred to as SDAFlex&Rel) to the development of reliable yet flexible software. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to quantitatively measure the flexibility of the software developed using SDAFlex&Rel, thereby making precise informal claims on the flexibility improvement. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed measurement approach is empirically investigated in the multi-lift case study that has already been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of SDAFlex&Rel. The results confirm the flexibility improvement promised by SDAFlex&Rel.

Keywords:

design patterns , flexibility , quantitative measurement , software metrics