Entropy Measure of Quality Metrics for XML Schema Documents

Abstract

Extensible Markup Language (XML) Schema documents (XSD) play an important role in software development process and need to be qualified with software qualities. A good quality design of XSD increases software productivity and minimize development time. In this respect, there are many qualities: maintainability, reusability, understandability, extensibility and so on. Among these qualities, this paper focuses on two qualities: extensible and reusable qualities and proposes two metrics to measure these qualities of schema documents based on Entropy method. Moreover, due to the defined maximum and minimum values for each quality metric, the proposed metrics can measure the specified quality. Therefore, the metrics can provide valuable information for improving the quality of XML based systems. The usefulness of the present metrics is empirically proved through actual test cases.