Adaptability Metric for Adaptation of the Dynamic Changes

Subbian Suganthi1 and Rethanaswamy Nadarajan2

1Department of Computer Technology and Applications, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, India

2Department of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences, PSG College of Technology, India

Abstract: Adapting dynamic changes in the user needs or in the environment is considered as one of the important quality attributes of a system in the pervasive or ubiquitous environment. An aspect-oriented framework to modularize the dynamic changes using aspects is considered as a solution for creating dynamic adaptable systems. This framework allows the system to reflect the dynamic changes on the associated components through aspects without altering the structure of the components. For evaluating the adaptability of this framework, a new adaptability metric has been proposed using the principles of coupling. In this work, coupling is defined as a Conceptual coupling between Aspects and Classes (CBAC), which represents the semantic association between the aspects that are used to represent dynamic changes and the components that are associated with the dynamic changes at the architecture level. The adaptable efficiency of the system that is the ability of reflecting the dynamic changes on the components associated with those changes is measured using the proposed conceptual coupling metric. Based on the measures it is concluded that adaptability efficiency of the system is increased with increasing the coupling between the aspect and the components. The proposed CBAC metric is evaluated and demonstrated by measuring the adaptability of the dynamic changes in the requirements of the various software systems.

Keywords: software adaptability, modularization, aspect-oriented approach, dynamic changes, adaptability metric, coupling metric.