More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Comparing software metrics tools

Authors:

Rüdiger Lincke,

Jonas Lundberg,

Welf LöweAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on Software testing and analysis

Pages 131 - 142

https://doi.org/10.1145/1390630.1390648

Published: 20 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper shows that existing software metric tools interpret and implement the definitions of object-oriented software metrics differently. This delivers tool-dependent metrics results and has even implications on the results of analyses based on these metrics results. In short, the metrics-based assessment of a software system and measures taken to improve its design differ considerably from tool to tool. To support our case, we conducted an experiment with a number of commercial and free metrics tools. We calculated metrics values using the same set of standard metrics for three software systems of different sizes. Measurements show that, for the same software system and metrics, the metrics values are tool depended. We also defined a (simple) software quality model for "maintainability" based on the metrics selected. It defines a ranking of the classes that are most critical wrt. maintainability. Measurements show that even the ranking of classes in a software system is metrics tool dependent.

References

[1]

J. Alghamdi, R. Rufai, and S. Khan. Oometer: A software quality assurance tool. Software Maintenance and Reengineering, 2005. CSMR 2005. 9th European Conference on, pages 190--191, 21-23 March 2005.

Digital Library

[2]

Aqris software. http://www.aqris.com/.

[3]

H. Bär, M. Bauer, O. Ciupke, S. Demeyer, S. Ducasse, M. Lanza, R. Marinescu, R. Nebbe, O. Nierstrasz, M. Przybilski, T. Richner, M. Rieger, C. Riva, A. Sassen, B. Schulz, P. Steyaert, S. Tichelaar, and J. Weisbrod. The FAMOOS Object-Oriented Reengineering Handbook, Oct. 1999.

[4]

G. V. Bard. Spelling-error tolerant, order-independent pass-phrases via the damerau-levenshtein string-edit distance metric. In ACSW '07: Proc. of the 5th Australasian symposium on ACSW frontiers, pages 117--124, Darlinghurst, Australia, 2007. ACS, Inc.

Digital Library

[5]

S. R. Chidamber and C. F. Kemerer. A Metrics Suite for Object-Oriented Design. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 20(6):476--493, 1994.

Digital Library

[6]

Clarkware consulting inc. http://www.clarkware.com/.

[7]

F. Damerau. A technique for computer detection and correction of spelling errors. Comm. of the ACM, 1964.

Digital Library

[8]

R. G. Dromey. Cornering the Chimera. IEEE Softw., 13(1):33--43, 1996.

Digital Library

[9]

EUROCONTROL. Overall Target Architecture Activity (OATA). http://www.eurocontrol.be/oca/public/standard page/overall arch.html, Jan 2007.

[10]

M. H. Halstead. Elements of Software Science (Operating and programming systems series). Elsevier Science Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1977.

Digital Library

[11]

hello2morrow. http://www.hello2morrow.com/.

[12]

B. Henderson-Sellers. Object-oriented metrics: measures of complexity. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 1996.

Digital Library

[13]

W. S. Humphrey. Introduction to the personal software process. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 1997.

Digital Library

[14]

hypercision inc., http://hypercision.com/.

[15]

instantiations inc., http://www.instantiations.com/.

[16]

ISO. ISO/IEC 9126-1 "Software engineering - Product Quality - Part 1: Quality model", 2001.

[17]

ISO. ISO/IEC 9126-3 "Software engineering - Product Quality - Part 3: Internal metrics", 2003.

[18]

Andrew cain. http://www.it.swin.edu.au/projects/jmetric/products/jmetric/default.htm.

[19]

E.-A. Karlsson, editor. Software Reuse: A Holistic Approach. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1995.

Digital Library

[20]

N. Kececi and A. Abran. Analysing, Measuring and Assessing Software Quality In a Logic Based Graphical Model, 2001. QUALITA 2001, Annecy, France, 2001, pp. 48--55.

[21]

B. Laguë and A. April. Mapping of Datrix(TM) Software Metrics Set to ISO 9126 Maintainability Sub-Characteristics, October 1996. SES '96, Forum on Software Eng. Standards Issues, Montreal, Canada.

[22]

Y. Lee and K. H. Chang. Reusability and Maintainability Metrics for Object-Oriented Software. In ACM-SE 38: Proc. of the 38th annual on Southeast regional conference, pages 88--94, 2000.

Digital Library

[23]

V. Levenshtein. Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady, 1966.

[24]

W. Li and S. Henry. Maintenance Metrics for the Object Oriented Paradigm. In IEEE Proc. of the 1st Int. Sw. Metrics Symposium, pages 52--60, May 1993.

[25]

R. Lincke. Validation of a Standard- and Metric-Based Software Quality Model -- Creating the Prerequisites for Experimentation. Licentiate thesis, MSI, Växjö University, Sweden, Apr 2007.

[26]

R. Lincke and W. Löwe. Compendium of Software Quality Standards and Metrics. http://www.arisa.se/compendium/, 2005.

[27]

J. A. McCall, P. G. Richards, and G. F. Walters. Factors in Software Quality. Technical Report Vol. I, NTIS Springfield, VA, 1977. NTIS AD/A-049 014.

[28]

M squared technologies. http://www.msquaredtechnologies.com/.

[29]

Power software. http://www.powersoftware.com/.

[30]

Semantic designs inc. http://www.semdesigns.com/.

[31]

W. Tichy. Should computer scientists experiment more? Computer, 31(5):32--40, May 1998.

Digital Library

[32]

Verifysoft technology. http://www.verifysoft.com/.

[33]

Virtual machinery. http://www.virtualmachinery.com/.

[34]

A. H. Watson and T. J. McCabe. Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric. NIST Special Pub. 500--235, 1996.

[35]

R. K. Yin. Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Applied Social Research Methods). SAGE Publications, December 2002.

Cited By

Garg KShekhar S(2024)Fault sensitivity index-based multi-objective testcase prioritizationJournal of Electrical Engineering10.2478/jee-2024-001875:2(151-160)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.2478/jee-2024-0018
Bugayenko YKholmatova ZKruglov APedrycz WSucci G(2024)Selecting optimal software code descriptors—The case of JavaPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.031084019:11(e0310840)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310840
Škipina MSlivka JLuburić NKovačević A(2024)Automatic detection of Feature Envy and Data Class code smells using machine learningExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122855243(122855)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122855
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Comparing software metrics tools
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability
        Software product lines

Recommendations

Empirical Validation of Three Software Metrics Suites to Predict Fault-Proneness of Object-Oriented Classes Developed Using Highly Iterative or Agile Software Development Processes

Empirical validation of software metrics suites to predict fault proneness in object-oriented (OO) components is essential to ensure their practical use in industrial settings. In this paper, we empirically validate three OO metrics suites for their ...
Deriving thresholds of software metrics to predict faults on open source software

We empirically examined if there are effective thresholds for software metrics.Open-source software systems were used as benchmarking datasets.The learner model was created using logistic regression and the Bender method.Experimental results revealed ...
Evaluating and comparing software metrics in the software engineering laboratory

There has appeared in the literature a great number of metrics that attempt to measure the effort or complexity in developing and understanding software(1). There have also been several attempts to independently validate these measures on data from ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA '08: Proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on Software testing and analysis

July 2008

324 pages

ISBN:9781605580500

DOI:10.1145/1390630

General Chair:
Barbara G. Ryder
Virginia Tech, USA
,
Program Chair:
Andreas Zeller
Saarland University, Germany

Copyright © 2008 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: 20 July 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ISSTA '08

Sponsor:

ISSTA '08: International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 20 - 24, 2008

WA, Seattle, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%

Upcoming Conference

ISSTA '25

Sponsor:
sigsoft

34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

June 25 - 28, 2025

Trondheim , Norway

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

114
Total Citations
View Citations
3,438
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)99
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8

Reflects downloads up to 21 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Garg KShekhar S(2024)Fault sensitivity index-based multi-objective testcase prioritizationJournal of Electrical Engineering10.2478/jee-2024-001875:2(151-160)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.2478/jee-2024-0018
Bugayenko YKholmatova ZKruglov APedrycz WSucci G(2024)Selecting optimal software code descriptors—The case of JavaPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.031084019:11(e0310840)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310840
Škipina MSlivka JLuburić NKovačević A(2024)Automatic detection of Feature Envy and Data Class code smells using machine learningExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122855243(122855)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.122855
Garg KShekhar S(2024)Test case prioritization based on fault sensitivity analysis using ranked NSGA-2International Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-024-01868-016:5(2875-2881)Online publication date: 2-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-024-01868-0
Garg KShekhar S(2024)Optimizing test case prioritization through ranked NSGA-2 for enhanced fault sensitivity analysisInnovations in Systems and Software Engineering10.1007/s11334-024-00561-620:3(307-328)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11334-024-00561-6
Bertrand SCiappelloni SFavier PAndré J(2023)Replication and Extension of Schnappinger’s Study on Human-level Ordinal Maintainability Prediction Based on Static Code MetricsProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593488(241-246)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593488
Neelofar NSmith-Miles KMuñoz MAleti A(2023)Instance Space Analysis of Search-Based Software TestingIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322833449:4(2642-2660)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3228334
Silva STuyishime ASantilli TPelliccione PIovino L(2023)Quality Metrics in Software Architecture2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00014(58-69)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA56044.2023.00014
Almogahed AMahdin HOmar MZakaria NMostafa SAlQahtani SPathak PShaharudin SHidayat R(2023)A Refactoring Classification Framework for Efficient Software MaintenanceIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.329867811(78904-78917)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3298678
Wolf F(2023)Reifegrad der SoftwareentwicklungSoftware im Automobil10.1007/978-3-662-67156-6_5(251-287)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67156-6_5
Show More Cited By

View Options

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