Measuring the quality of interfaces using source code entropy

Global enterprises face an increasingly high complexity of software systems. Although size and complexity are two different aspects of a software system, traditionally, various size metrics have been established to indicate their complexity. In fact, many developed software metrics correlate with the number of lines of code. Moreover, a combination of multiple metrics collected on bottom layers into one comprehensible and meaningful indicator for an entire system is not a trivial task. This paper proposes a novel interpretation of an entropy-based metric to assess the design of a software system in terms of interface quality and understandability. The proposed metric is independent of the system size and delivers one single value eliminating the unnecessary aggregation step. Further, an industrial case study has been conducted to illustrate the usefulness of this metric.