An Analysis of Some Commercial PL/I Programs

Elshoff, James L.

doi:10.1109/tse.1976.233538

Cited by 109 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Other metrics focus on the data-flow aspect of the code. The Dep-Degree metric counts the number of edges in the definitionuse graph [5], and Lifespan is the average of all spans of all variables in a method where span is defined as the number of LOC between one occurrence of a variable and its next occurrence [10]. The CFS (cognitive functional size) belongs to the cognitive category of metrics.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the effect of code regularity on comprehension

Jbara

Feitelson

2014

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension

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It is naturally easier to comprehend simple code relative to complicated code. Regrettably, there is little agreement on how to effectively measure code complexity. As a result simple generalpurpose metrics are often used, such as lines of code (LOC), McCabe's cyclomatic complexity (MCC), and Halstead's metrics. But such metrics just count syntactic features, and ignore details of the code's global structure, which may also have an effect on understandability. In particular, we suggest that code regularity-where the same structures are repeated time after time-may significantly reduce complexity, because once one figures out the basic repeated element it is easier to understand additional instances. We demonstrate this by controlled experiments where subjects perform cognitive tasks on different versions of the same basic function. The results indicate that versions with significant regularity lead to better comprehension, while taking similar time, despite being longer and having higher MCC. These results indicate that regularity is another attribute of code that should be taken into account in the context of studying the code's complexity and comprehension. Moreover, the fact that regularity may compensate for LOC and MCC demonstrates that complexity cannot be decomposed into independently addable contributions by individual attributes.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the effect of code regularity on comprehension

Jbara

Feitelson

2014

Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension

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“…While there has been a substantial body of work on metrics definitions and their correlation with program faults [10,18,19] or maintainability and bugs [7,8] we will not discuss which metrics are reasonable or particularly important. Neither will we address which metric values indicate good or poor quality.…”

Section: Integrating Software Metricsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Function G is defined by the GXSL semantics, and returns for a given environment a set of AST nodes. Given the variable declaration, upd V in (8) updates ν ∈ VEnv and maps counting variables to the semantics B of the associated binding. Function D associates the metric with the semantics E for the associated arithmetic expression.…”

Section: Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Metrics in Static Program Analysis

Vogelsang

Fehnker

Huuck

et al. 2010

Formal Methods and Software Engineering

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Software metrics play an important role in the management of professional software projects. Metrics are used, e.g., to track development progress, to measure restructuring impact and to estimate code quality. They are most beneficial if they can be computed continuously at development time. This work presents a framework and an implementation for integrating metric computations into static program analysis. The contributions are a language and formal semantics for user-definable metrics, an implementation and integration in the existing static analysis tool Goanna, and a user-definable visualization approach to display metrics results. Moreover, we report our experiences on a case study of a popular open source code base.

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“…From the 1970s to the 1990s the costs of maintenance ranged from 49% [6] to 75% [7] of the total software costs. Nowadays the proportion of costs caused by system maintenance and evolution may in some cases be more than 90% [8], and about 75% of the maintenance costs are caused by enhancements, i.e., adaptive and perfective maintenance [9][10][11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fault-Proneness of Open Source Software: Exploring its Relations to Internal Software Quality and Maintenance Process

Kozlov¹,

Koskinen²,

Sakkinen

2013

TOSEJ

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The goal of this study is to explore how fault-proneness of open source software (OSS) could be explained in terms of internal quality attributes and maintenance process metrics. We reviewed earlier studies and performed a multiple case study of eight Java-based projects based on data available in the Source Forge repository. Overall, we studied 342 releases of those systems. As is usual, software quality was regarded as a set of internal and external quality attributes. A total of 76 internal quality attributes were measured from the source code of the selected systems via the tool SoftCalc. Two external quality attributes contributing to fault-proneness were in turn obtained from the Source Forge Issue Tracking System. The framework for assessing the maintenance process was adopted from our previous studies. Its distinguishing feature is that it takes into account the peculiarities of OSS development. We included 23 maintenance process metrics to this study. Relationships between the metrics under study were identified by means of correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis and factor analysis. The obtained results give an interesting insight into interpretation of the earlier results of other researchers, regarding especially their generalizability. The strengths of our study include the following: 1) we studied a greater number of metrics than most of the related studies, 2) we studied a greater number of OSS-systems than most of the studies, and 3) we focused on the fault-proneness of modern Java-based systems and investigated them as an aggregated sample.

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An Analysis of Some Commercial PL/I Programs

Cited by 109 publications

References 6 publications

On the effect of code regularity on comprehension

On the effect of code regularity on comprehension

Software Metrics in Static Program Analysis

Fault-Proneness of Open Source Software: Exploring its Relations to Internal Software Quality and Maintenance Process

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