A metric for evaluating software architecture and communication models consistency

Among several alternative viewpoints for building software quality metrics, evaluating the consistency between different models in a software specification or implementation appears to be fruitful. An obvious difficulty is that different models are usually expressed by means of different concepts, and then, confronting heterogeneous representations is not straightforward. In this paper, we propose a solution for measuring the consistency between the architecture and the communication models. After some sensible transformations, the information about both models are captured trough hierarchical representations. We define and discuss a similarity measure between hierarchies, that eventually founds the software metric we propose. Lastly, we investigate how to scale and interpret the metric values and give an application example with SDL.