Power law distributions in class relationships

Wheeldon, Richard; Counsell, Steve

doi:10.1109/scam.2003.1238030

Cited by 91 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In addition, we choose an integrated development environment (Eclipse) 42 , a messaging and integration pattern server (ApacheActiveMQ) 43 , inc: in-cycle, oinc: out-of-cycle and a service framework (Apache-CXF) 44 all developed with Java. We have purposefully selected very active projects from the open source community and we also considered projects that have different functionalities with different development languages and variations in release dates (see Table II and Table III).…”

Section: Methods Of Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This imprecision can occur due to polymorphism, dynamic binding and dead code in the software. This as it may, static code analysis has been found to be practically useful and less expensive to collect [5,6,21,23,[42][43][44]. In addition, we collect coupling types that are not only based on method invocation.…”

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the results seem to be consistent with some other recent research on the shape of software. Several authors have studied the networks formed by software artefacts and their relationships and found that they are scale-free, and have a heavy tail distribution with a very few nodes with high connectivity [44], [17], [18], [32].…”

Section: A Cycles and The Shape Of Java Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Initial survey of Smart Grid activities in the Norwegian energy sector - use cases, industrial challenges and implications for research

Oyetoyan¹,

Conradi²

2012

2012 First International Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges for the Smart Grid (SE-SmartGrids)

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Society, systems and related businesses are increasingly dependent on software applications, which are integrated and interoperate with other systems. This dependency has implications for the dependability of both the systems and the businesses. There have been reported cases over the years of both systems and business failures due to software defects. However, the work and effort needed to correct defects is not trivial. This involves changing existing applications, which may be overly complex in their structure. Software undergoes constant evolution due to changes in the business environment such as introduction of new technology or new requirements. It is therefore not surprising that the cost of software maintenance is normally estimated to be the highest in the overall software budget. As the software evolves, so does its size and complexity.One aspect of software complexity is dependency cycles that are formed among software classes and packages. Many design guidelines advocate to avoid dependency cycles and argue that they inhibit software quality. Despite this conventional wisdom, empirical evidence shows that modern software indeed is riddled with this anti-pattern. The question remains that if cyclic property is known to be complex and is pervasive in software applications, how does it relate to defects and change in general, and what can be done to improve efforts to mitigate it?This thesis investigates dependency cycles among software components; an aspect of software structural complexity, to find how such properties correlate with defect measures and change rates, and how this knowledge can motivate to refactor and improve these possible defects hotspots in affected systems. The two main research questions to achieve these objectives are stated as follows: RQ1.What is the effect of dependency cycles on external quality measures of software systems?RQ2. How to refactor dependency cycle to impact the structural quality and reduce refactoring efforts?This work contributes mainly to improvement in software quality (maintainability and indirectly, reliability) and software metrics. The following are the three major contributions of this thesis:C1. Better understanding of how to utilize different defect metrics to improve software quality C2. Identification of the impact of dependency cycles on software quality C2-1: Identification of dependency cycles and neighbourhood as defect hotspots in software systems C2-2: Better understanding of the change impact of dependency cycles C3. Tool and metrics to refactor defect-and change-prone hotspots in dependency cycles C3-1: Added metrics to understand the complexity of components and improve the refactoring of cyclically dependent components C3-2: A cycle breaking decision support system to refactor cyclically connected components ii iii Preface

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Section: Methods Of Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Threats To Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Cycles and The Shape Of Java Programsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Initial survey of Smart Grid activities in the Norwegian energy sector - use cases, industrial challenges and implications for research

Oyetoyan¹,

Conradi²

2012

2012 First International Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges for the Smart Grid (SE-SmartGrids)

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“…Usually, power-law, Zipfian distribution, FP, etc., are interpreted as the result of a stochastic growth process, with birth and death mechanism [4]. And, because of the clustering of high-rank values close to the x axis, values are sometimes grouped into buckets of exponentially increasing size in order to improve the accuracy of the regression [5].…”

Section: Parabolic Scaling Of Rank-size Distributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructal theory of parabolic scaling

Périn

2012

WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment

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The parabolic scaling of rank-size distributions is a very common phenomenon in natural or societal systems such as city sizes, petroleum reservoirs, or galactic intensities. Often, the divergence from a log-log linear power-law is explained by the finite size of the system studied. Several distribution functions were also proposed to best fit this kind of distribution, such as the parabolic fractal or the stretched exponential. In order to explain the emergence of this rank-size distribution pattern, we propose instead to consider a generic mechanism of constructal tree-shaped invasion of a territory combined with the constructal rank-size distribution of a growing flow architecture as the mechanism potentially generating a wide variety of parabolically scaling distributions. Simulations of this mechanism were conducted and we showed that it generated shorter and curved distribution tails similar to a parabolic scaling. In conclusion, we propose to consider the constructal law as the first principle behind the generation of parabolic scaling of rank-size distributions in natural, societal, and engineered systems.

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“…In [4], key structural attributes of a hand-picked corpus of well-known programs are measured, and a careful analysis of the distribution for these properties is provided. We also refer to [35] for a related study on power-law distributions for class relationships. In [5], Java bytecode programs are studied empirically to determine simple counts (number of methods per class, number of bytecode instructions per method, etc.…”

Section: Properties Of Java Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Large-scale, AST-based API-usage analysis of open-source Java projects

Lämmel

Pek

Starek

2011

Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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Research on API migration and language conversion can be informed by empirical data about API usage. For instance, such data may help with designing and defending mapping rules for API migration in terms of relevance and applicability. We describe an approach to large-scale API-usage analysis of opensource Java projects, which we also instantiate for the SourceForge open-source repository in a certain way. Our approach covers checkout, building, tagging with metadata, fact extraction, analysis, and synthesis with a large degree of automation. Fact extraction relies on resolved (type-checked) ASTs. We describe a few examples of API-usage analysis; they are motivated by API migration. These examples are concerned with analysing API footprint (such as the numbers of distinct APIs used in a project), API coverage (such as the percentage of methods of an API used in a corpus), and framework-like vs. class-library-like usage.

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Power law distributions in class relationships

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 91 publications

References 17 publications

Initial survey of Smart Grid activities in the Norwegian energy sector - use cases, industrial challenges and implications for research

Initial survey of Smart Grid activities in the Norwegian energy sector - use cases, industrial challenges and implications for research

Constructal theory of parabolic scaling

Large-scale, AST-based API-usage analysis of open-source Java projects

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