Architectural Quality

I have been thinking a lot about architectural quality and more specifically how to measure it. Code quality can though of as code maintainability as in a maintainability index measuring things like cyclomatic complexity. These seem to be specific instances of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG’s) which is a well known area of analysis.

Isolation can be measured by an information flow measure such as Henry and Kafura use which is different from cyclomatic’s.

There are a number of programs which use these techniques for code quality such as CCCC and together controlcenter.

I think some of these techniques can be applied to Platt’s first law (my measure of architectural quality) which will give an interesting metric for architectural quality.