research-article

Assessing traditional and new metrics for object-oriented systems

Authors:

Michele Marchesi,

Alessandro Murgia,

Roberto TonelliAuthors Info & Claims

WETSoM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics

Pages 24 - 31

https://doi.org/10.1145/1809223.1809227

Published: 04 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We present an extensive analysis of software metrics for 111 object-oriented systems written in Java. For each system, we considered 18 traditional metrics such as LOC and Chidamber and Kemerer metrics, as well as metrics derived from complex network theory and social network analysis. These metrics were computed at class level. We also considered two metrics at system level, namely the total number of classes and interfaces, and the fractal dimension. We discuss the distribution of these metrics, and their correlation, both at class and at system level. We found that most metrics follow a leptokurtotic distribution. Only a couple of metrics have patent normal behavior while three others are very irregular, and even bimodal. The statistics gathered allow us to study and discuss the variability of metrics along different systems, and to devise a roadmap for further research.

References

[1]

S. R. Chidamber and C. F. Kemerer,"A metrics suite for object oriented design", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol 20, pp. 476--493, June1994.

Digital Library

[2]

S. R. Chidamber, D. P. Darcy, and C. F. Kemerer, "Managerial Use of Metrics for Object Oriented Software: An Exploratory Analysis", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol 24(8), pp. 629--639, 1998.

Digital Library

[3]

V. R. Basili, L. C. Briand, and W. L. Melo, "A Validation of Object Oriented Design Metrics as Quality Indicators. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 22(10), pp. 267--271, 1996.

Digital Library

[4]

R. Subramanyam and M. Krishnan, "Empirical analysis of ck metrics for object-oriented design complexity: Implications for software defects", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. 29, pp. 297--310, 2003.

Digital Library

[5]

T. Gyimoothy, R. Ferenc, and I. Siket, "Empirical validation of object-oriented metrics on open source software for fault prediction", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. 31, pp. 897--910, 2005.

Digital Library

[6]

F. Brito e Abreu, "The MOOD Metrics Set", Proc. ECOOP'95 Workshop on Metrics, 1995.

[7]

M. Lorenz and J. Kidd, "Object-oriented software metrics: A practical guide". Engle wood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall., 1992.

Digital Library

[8]

S. Valverde, R. Ferrer-Cancho, and R. Solé, "Scale-free networks from optimal design", Europhysics Lett., vol. 60, pp. 512--517, 2002.

[9]

G. Concas, M. Marchesi, S. Pinna, N. Serra, "Power-Laws in a Large Object-Oriented Software System", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. 33, no. 10. pp. 687--708, 2007.

Digital Library

[10]

T. Zimmermann and N. Nagappan, "Predicting Defects using Network Analysis on Dependency Graphs", Proc. ICSE 2008, pp. 531--540, May 10--18, Leipzig, Germany, 2008.

Digital Library

[11]

M. Pinzger, N. Nagappan, and B. Murphy, "Can Developer-Module Networks Predict Failures?", Proc. SIGSOFT 2008/FSE-16, November 9--15, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2008.

Digital Library

[12]

A. Meneely and L. Williams, "Evaluating a Suite of Developer Activity Metrics as Measures of Security Vulnerabilities", Computer Science Dept. Tech. Report 28, North Carolina State Univ., 2008.

[13]

T. Wolf, A. Schoter, D. Damian, and T. Nguyen, "Predicting Build Failures using Social Network Analysis on Developer Communication", Proc. ICSE 2009, May 16--24, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2009.

Digital Library

[14]

M. Cataldo, A. Mockus, J. A. Roberts, and J. D. Herbsleb, "Software Dependencies, Work Dependencies, and Their Impact on Failures", IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. 35, no. 6. pp. 864--878, 2009.

Digital Library

[15]

A. Tosun, B. Turhan, and A. Bener, "Validation of network measures as indicators of defective modules in software systems", Proc. 5th Int. Conf. Predictor Models in Software Eng., Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2009.

Digital Library

[16]

Qualitas Research Group, Qualitas Corpus Version 20090202, http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ewan/corpus. The University of Auckland, February 2009.

[17]

Eclipse Project, http://www.eclipse.org, 2009.

[18]

Netbeans Project, http://www.netbeans.org, 2009.

[19]

G. Concas, M. Locci, M. Marchesi, S. Pinna, I. Turnu, "Fractal dimension in software networks", Europhysics Lett., vol. 76, pp. 1221--1227, 2006.

[20]

R. A. Hanneman and M. Riddle, Introduction to social network methods. Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside 2005.

[21]

G. Sabidussi, "The centrality index of a graph", Psychometrika, vol. 31, pp. 581--603, 1966.

[22]

C. Song, S. Havlin and H. A. Makse, "Self-similarity of complex networks", Nature, vol. 433, pp. 392--395, 2005.

[23]

G. Baxter, M. Frean, J. Noble, M. Rickerby, H. Smith, M. Visser, H. Melton, and E. Tempero, "Understanding the shape of Java software", Proc. of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN conference Object-oriented programming languages, systems, and applications(OOPSLA), Oct 2006, Portland, USA.

Digital Library

[24]

Y. Gil and I. Maman, "Micro Patterns in Java Code", Proc. 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN Conf. Object oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA '05), pp. 97--116, 2005.

Digital Library

Cited By

Iftikhar UAli NBörstler JUsman M(2024)A tertiary study on links between source code metrics and external quality attributesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107348165(107348)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107348
Liu MQi XPan H(2022)Multifractal analysis of the software evolution in software networksChinese Physics B10.1088/1674-1056/ac1b8a31:3(030501)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-1056/ac1b8a
Song ZWang YWang WZhang J(2020)An Empirical study of Exploring Relevant Metrics to Assess Software Product Quality2020 7th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Their Applications (DSA)10.1109/DSA51864.2020.00023(114-124)Online publication date: Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/DSA51864.2020.00023
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Assessing traditional and new metrics for object-oriented systems
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Metrics
2. Software and its engineering

Recommendations

Detection of Software Anomalies Using Object-oriented Metrics
ICEIS 2014: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2

The development of quality software has always been the aim of many studies in past years, in which the

focus was on seeking for better software production with high effectiveness and quality. In order to evaluate software quality, software metrics were ...
An Empirical Exploration of the Distributions of the Chidamber and Kemerer Object-Oriented Metrics Suite

The object-oriented metrics suite proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) is a measurement approach towards improved object-oriented design and development practices. However, existing studies evidence traces of collinearity between some of the metrics ...
Adoption of object-oriented software metrics for ontology evaluation
BCI '12: Proceedings of the Fifth Balkan Conference in Informatics

Object-oriented software metrics are well established and widely acknowledged as a measure of software quality. The aim of our research is to analyze the potential use of some of these metrics for ontology evaluation. In this paper we present the ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WETSoM '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics

May 2010

94 pages

ISBN:9781605589763

DOI:10.1145/1809223

Conference Chairs:
Gerardo Canfora
University of Sannio, Italy
,
Giulio Concas
University of Cagliari, Italy
,
Michele Marchesi
University of Cagliari, Italy
,
Ewan Tempero
University of Auckland, New Zealand
,
Hongyu Zhang
Tsinghua University, China

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 May 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICSE '10

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE '10: 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 4, 2010

Cape Town, South Africa

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

20
Total Citations
View Citations
570
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 13 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Iftikhar UAli NBörstler JUsman M(2024)A tertiary study on links between source code metrics and external quality attributesInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107348165(107348)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107348
Liu MQi XPan H(2022)Multifractal analysis of the software evolution in software networksChinese Physics B10.1088/1674-1056/ac1b8a31:3(030501)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-1056/ac1b8a
Song ZWang YWang WZhang J(2020)An Empirical study of Exploring Relevant Metrics to Assess Software Product Quality2020 7th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Their Applications (DSA)10.1109/DSA51864.2020.00023(114-124)Online publication date: Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/DSA51864.2020.00023
Song ZWang YZong PRen ZQi D(2019)An Empirical Study of Comparison of Code Metric Aggregation Methods–on Embedded Software2019 IEEE 19th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C.2019.00034(114-119)Online publication date: Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS-C.2019.00034
Porru SPinna AMarchesi MTonelli RUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)Blockchain-oriented software engineeringProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.142(169-171)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.142
Destefanis GOrtu MPorru SSwift SMarchesi M(2016)A statistical comparison of Java and Python software metric propertiesProceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics10.1145/2897695.2897697(22-28)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2897695.2897697
Orru MPorru STonelli RMarchesi M(2015)A Preliminary Study on Mobile Apps Call Graphs through a Complex Network ApproachProceedings of the 2015 11th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS)10.1109/SITIS.2015.95(482-488)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SITIS.2015.95
Destefanis GCounsell SConcas GTonelli R(2014)Software metrics in agile softwareAgile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming10.5555/2813544.2813555(157-170)Online publication date: 26-May-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2813544.2813555
Destefanis GCounsell SConcas GTonelli R(2014)Software Metrics in Agile Software: An Empirical StudyAgile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_11(157-170)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06862-6_11
Saraiva JSoares SCastor F(2013)Towards a catalog of Object-Oriented Software Maintainability metrics2013 4th International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics (WETSoM)10.1109/WETSoM.2013.6619342(84-87)Online publication date: May-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/WETSoM.2013.6619342
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents