A Quantitative Evaluation of Maintainability of Software Architecture Styles

Proper decisions play a crucial role in any software architecture design process. An important decision of design stage is the selection of a suitable software architecture style. Lack of investigation on the quantitative impact of architecture styles on software quality attributes is the main problem in using such styles. Consequently, the use of architecture styles in designing is based on the intuition of software developers. The aim of this research is to quantify the impacts of architecture styles on software maintainability that is an expected quality of each software. In this study, architecture styles are quantified based on coupling, complexity and cohesion metrics and ranked by analytic hierarchy process from a maintainability viewpoint. Metrics validation confirms fitness of the metrics. Regarding the great impact of this decision on maintainability of software product, the presented parametric model provides a basis for sensible selection of architecture style.