Abstract—The Component Based Software Development

(CBSD) approach is becoming the trend for software development which is based on developing the software from existing components instead of developing software from scratch everytime. Measuring software complexity is an important aspect during software development. Because software complexity is an important determinant of software development effort, testing effort, cost, maintainability etc. Researchers have proposed a wide range of complexity metrics for software systems. But the traditional software product and process metrics are neither suitable nor sufficient in measuring the Component and Component Based Software (CBS) complexity. So CBSD provides one of the central problems in measuring component and CBS complexity. Measuring component complexity plays an important role in determining the complexity of CBS system. Because component complexity affects the complexity of whole CBS. Component complexity affects integration and testing effort, cost, maintainability of CBS system. But now a days black box components are being used during CBSD and most of the time source code is not available which creates difficulty in measuring component complexity. In this paper a metric has been proposed for determining the black box component complexity. The proposed metric measures component complexity on the basis of component interface specification and use the concept of assigned weights