UXSOM

Abstract

Software developers are increasingly using Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools to automate source code generation. Therefore, nowadays calculating software metrics from UML diagrams to evaluate software quality is an important trend in the software industry. However, acquisition of software metrics from Extensible Markup Language (XML) export of UML tools has been predominantly tool dependent. Moreover, each new tool may have different specifications in XML. Despite the overall need for a process to automate XML unification, no current solution has yet been proposed. Creating a framework to automate this assessment would streamline development and increase efficiency in software industry. With the aim to overcome this deficiency, we developed a parser-based framework, named UXSOM, to calculate software metrics independently from the UML tool. Particularly UXSOM is able to generate software metrics from the XML-based outputs of the tools, ArgoUML, UMLET, MagicDraw, Sparx Systems, and ESS Model. We showed a very general case of UML class diagram, in which we extracted and compared software metrics from these five different tool.