Dependency analysis for component-based software systems

Abstract

Interaction in component-based systems (CBS) happens when a component provides an interface and other components use it, and also when a component submits an event and other component receives it. Interactions promote dependencies. Higher dependency leads to a complex system, which results in poor understanding and a higher maintenance cost. Usually, dependency is represented by an adjacency matrix used in graph theory. However, this representation can check only for the presence of dependency between components and does not consider the type of interactions between these components. Interaction type can have a significant contribution to the complexity of the system. This paper proposes a link-list based dependency representation and implements it by using Hash Map in Java. This representation can store the dependency along with other information like, provided and required interfaces of components along with their types. This information can be used to analyze several interaction and dependency related issues. This paper also presents the results of an experiment of the proposed approach and measures the interaction densities and dependency level of an individual component and for the system The results show that the proposed metrics can also be used to identify the most critical and isolated components in the system, which can lead to better understanding and easy system maintenance.