Power law in XML schema metrics

Software metrics are vital for the management of software development, especially when a new technology is being adopted and its best practice has yet to be established. XML Schema is a relatively new technology that has been widely adopted in software development. Despite its widespread usage in almost all different kinds of programming platforms, its usage patterns are not yet fully investigated. From two large sets of real XML Schemas, this thesis studies the distribution of some of the schema metrics and the structure of some large schemas. Elements in a schema are connected by their usage links. The interconnected elements can be viewed as a network of elements or a graph. This thesis also studies the structural properties of the network of the schema elements, including the scale free property, the connection of the graph, and its small world effect