Paper Info
Title
Towards a Theoretical Model for Software Growth
Abstract
Software growth (and more broadly, software evolution) is usually considered in terms of size or complexity of source code. However in different studies, usually different metrics are used, which make it difficult to compare approaches and results. In addition, not all metrics are equally easy to cal- culate for a given source code, which leads to the ques- tion of which one is the easiest to calculate without losing too much information. To address both issues, in this pa- per present a comprehensive study, based on the analysis of about 700,000 C source code files, calculating several size and complexity metrics for all of them. For this sample, we have found double Pareto statistical distributions for all metrics considered, and a high correlation between any two of them. This would imply that any model addressing soft- ware growth should produce this Pareto distributions, and that analysis based on any of the considered metrics should show a similar pattern, provided the sample of files consid- ered is large enough.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1109/MSR.2007.31
Minneapolis, MN
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
different metrics,pareto distribution,complexity metrics,software growth,c source code file,theoretical model,pareto statistical distribution,source code,software evolution,different study,files consid,statistical distribution,software metrics,packaging,linux,pareto analysis,statistical analysis,software measurement,software engineering,statistical distributions,pattern analysis
Conference
0-7695-2950-X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
43
1.89
10
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Israel Herraiz150326.83
Jesús M. González-Barahona268345.94
Gregorio Robles3129491.67