GUI Structural Metrics
Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Yarmouk University, Jordan
Abstract: User interfaces have special characteristics that differentiate them from the rest of the software code. Typical oftware metrics that indicate its complexity and quality may not be able to distinguish a complex GUI or a high quality one rom another that is not. This paper is about suggesting and introducing some GUI structural metrics that can be gathered ynamically using a test automation tool. Rather than measuring quality or usability, the goal of those developed metrics is to easure the GUI testability, or how much it is hard, or easy to test a particular user interface. We evaluate GUIs for several easons such as usability and testability. In usability, users evaluate a particular user interface for how much easy, convenient, and fast it is to deal with it. In our testability evaluation, we want to automate the process of measuring the complexity of the user interface from testing perspectives. Such metrics can be used as a tool to estimate required resources to test a particular application.
Keywords: Layout complexity, GUI metrics, and interface usability.
Received July 14, 2009; accepted August 3, 2009