Measuring the Size of Stereotypes, Profiles, and Stereotyped Designs in UML

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is becoming the lingua franca in software development. One of the reasons of its popularity is the possibility to enrich the set of modeling elements of the language via the language's extension mechanisms. Such a customization of the language leads to a growing complexity of language’s constructs. To improve understanding of such extensions, a set of measurements for them is required. This paper proposes three sets of metrics useful in measuring the size of the extensions and measuring the size of designs with stereotypes. The metrics are used in our research in order to compare various extensions with respect to their size and complexity and in order to provide a means for comparing quality of extensions