Exploring the Relationships between the Understandability of Architectural Components and Graph-Based Component Level Metrics

Architectural component models are frequently used as a central view of architectural descriptions of software systems and therefore play a crucial role in the whole development process and in achieving the desired software qualities. The components in those models represent important high level structural units that are often used to group either lower-level sub-components or classes in object-oriented design views. In this paper we present a study that examines the relationships between the effort required to understand a component, measured through the time that participants spent on studying a component, and a number of information theory based and the corresponding counting based metrics on graphs at the component level. The results show a statistically significant correlation between all of the metrics and the effort required to understand a component. In a multivariate regression analysis we obtained some reasonably well-fitting models that can be used to estimate the effort required to understand a component.