Defining maintainable components in the design phase

During component based software engineering it is important for component developers to design components that show high cohesion within a component and low coupling between components. Empirical data shows that software artifacts possessing these properties are more maintainable. Current practice in design metric evaluation relies on extracting structural metrics from individual UML views. This paper defines a dynamic approach that collects metrics during execution of a model that integrates both UML class and sequence diagrams. These design metrics are used to evaluate component choices by examining cohesion and coupling properties. We base our design metrics on code metrics that have been positively correlated with quality. We provide an empirical study that demonstrates a positive correlation between design and code metrics.