Content area
The process of software development, including documentation, design, program ,test and maintenance can be measured statistically. Therefore the quality of software can be monitored efficiently. Software metrics is very important in research of software engineering and it has developed gradually. Component-based systems(CBS) achieve flexibility by clearly separating the stable parts of systems (i.e. the components) from the specification of their composition. In order to realize the reuse of components effectively in component based system development (CBSD), it is required to measure the reusability of components. However, due to the black-box nature of components where the source code of these components are not available, it is difficult to use conventional metrics in CBSD as these metrics require analysis of source codes. In this paper, we survey few existing component-quality attribute based metrics with their limitations and how these metrics helps in computing the quality of the software and how their use can help achieve a high quality software system. These metrics give a border view of component's complexity, reusability, interface complexity and coupling among the components. As the CBS development is rising more and more quality attribute based metrics are being developed for the same.