Complexity Metrics for Formally Specified Business Requirements

According to the Zachman framework for system architecture, business requirements and user information requirements should be separately modelled to enhance the maintainability and adaptability of the information systems and to improve the flexibility of the system development process. The measurement of business requirements is largely an unexplored field since requirements specification measures (e.g., function points) have focused almost exclusively on user information requirements. However, as a problem domain model, business requirements are worth measuring. In this paper a measurement model is presented that builds upon a formal specification language. The model allows to define meaningful viewpoints on business requirements complexity. Using a Measure Theoretic approach, a number of complexity measures are defined in an attempt to extent the life cycle coverage of software measurement to the business requirements specification phase