Measuring the complexity of a large-scale software system has been a urgent demand in software development practices. The traditional software metrics can hardly describe the structural complexity in modern software. As the complex networks theory has been used to study the software structure, we analyzed a great many software systems. The analyzing results reveal the parameters in complex networks can be used to represent property of software structure. And this paper introduces some efficient metrics and measuring methods based on basic parameters in complex networks. A practice example was described to demonstrate the effectiveness of the metrics.
The networks of interdependencies in large-scale Object Oriented software systems are complex, visualization and understand become the important issues for developer. We propose that topology structure can be imaged to network and better understood via core structure decomposition based on complex networks. The core structure analysis allows characterizing networks beyond the degree distribution and uncovering some potential characteristics, Such as structural hierarchies, centrality and evolution. We analyze the core structure of some popular open source software and discuss the differences and similarities, get some noticeable properties, the result show the method provides an interesting view helping to comprehend and evaluate system in development.
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