Usability evaluation of component based software system using software metrics

Abstract

Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) provides a way to create a new Component Based Software System (CBSS) by utilizing the existing components. The primary reason for that is to minimize the software development time, cost and effort. CBSS also increases the component reusability. Due to these advantages, software industries are working on CBSS and continuously trying to provide quality product. Usability is one of the major quality factors for CBSS. It should be measured before delivering the software product to the customer, so that if there are any usability flaws, it can be removed by software development team. In this paper, work has been done to evaluate the usability of CBSS based on major usability sub-factors (learnability, operability, understandability and configurability). For this purpose, firstly software metrics are identified for each usability sub-factor and the value of each sub-factor is evaluated for a component based software project. Secondly, overall usability of the software project is evaluated by using the calculated value of each usability sub-factor. Usability for the same project was also evaluated using Fuzzy approach in MATLAB to validate the experimental work of this research paper. It was identified that the value of usability obtained from software metrics and fuzzy model was very similar. This research work will be useful for the software developer to evaluate the usability of any CBSS and will also help them to compare different version of any CBSS in term of their usability.