Measuring and Evaluating a Design Complexity Metric for XML Schema Documents

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been gaining extraordinary acceptance from many diverse enterprise software companies for their object repositories, data interchange, and development tools. Further, many different domains, organizations and content providers have been publishing and exchanging information via internet by the usage of XML and standard schemas. Efficient implementation of XML in these domains requires well designed XML schemas. In this point of view, design of XML schemas plays an extremely important role in software development process and needs to be quantified for ease of maintainability. In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of XML schema documents (XSD) written in W3C XML Schema language. We propose a metric, which measures the complexity due to the internal architecture of XSD components, and due to recursion. This is the single metric, which cover all major factors responsible for complexity of XSD. The metric has been empirically and theoretically validated, demonstrated with examples and supported by comparison with other well known structure metrics applied on XML schema documents.