• how to explore metric data in the table view, metric view, and element view,
• how to check design rule violations,
• how to compare designs, and
• how to view relation matrices.

The first screenshot shows the tabular view of the metric data: design elements (classes, packages, etc) by row, metric values by column.

Within SDMetrics, you can sort the table by columns, to quickly identify the elements with the highest or lowest values for a particular metric. In addition, you can highlight metric values above or below a given percentile. For instance, you may choose to highlight, in each column, the top 5% highest metric values.

2. Metric View

The metric view shows information for one metric at a time. You can quickly browse through histograms and cumulative distribution graphs for all metrics, to get an idea of the distributions of the metrics and visually identify possible outliers:

The metric view also provides descriptive statistics for the metric, including maximum and minimum values, mean, standard deviation, and percentiles (configurable).

3. Element View

The element view shows information for one UML design element at a time. You can browse through Kiviat diagrams for all elements. The diagram shows the measurement values of all metrics for the selected element. Each axis (or ray) of the graph represents one metric, as labeled in the graph.

The thick line connects the metric values of the selected element for each metric on the axes. If the element has many large values, the area enclosed by the thick line will be large. So the size of the enclosed area serves as an indicator of the criticality of the element.

You can also show on the graph the percentiles of the metrics (gray areas). This gives an indication how the measurement values of the selected element compare to all other elements.

4. Design Rule Checking

The design rule checker lists all detected violations of design rules. You can quickly sort the list by violating element, violated rule, severity or category of the violated rule.

5. Design Comparison

SDMetrics can take the design metrics for two designs and calculate the metric deltas. This view presents the absolute or relative metric deltas in tabular form: design elements by row, metrics by column.

Added and deleted design elements are highlighted by color, as are positive and negative metric deltas. This shows how much the metric values have increased or decreased between designs, and for which design elements. You can also display side by side descriptive statistics (sum, mean, percentiles) for both designs (see here).

6. Relation Matrices

Relation matrices show relations between individual design elements, for example, associations between actors and use cases, stimuli sent between objects, etc. The rows of a relation matrix show the source design elements from which the relationship originates; the columns contain the target design elements of the relation. The table cells indicate the presence or number of relationships between the respective source and target design element.