Formalizing UML Model Metrics Using Z Language

Till now, a large variety of researchers have carried out lots of efforts on object-oriented and UML model metrics from different views. They put forward numerous of metrics and carried out some series of theoretical and experimental verifications on understandability, analyzability, maintainability, fault-proneness, change-proneness and reuse. However, there is no formal semantic specification for UML model metrics, which may lead to potential semantic inconsistency and ambiguity. To solve this problem, this paper provided formalization for UML model metrics at the level of UML Meta models. This formalization can not only help people to understand the meaning of UML model metrics, but also can be used in the application domain of UML model metrics in a more rigorous way.