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Software Quality Journal

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01.06.2007

Measuring size, complexity, and coupling of hypergraph abstractions of software: An information-theory approach

verfasst von: Edward B. Allen, Sampath Gottipati, Rajiv Govindarajan

Erschienen in: Software Quality Journal | Ausgabe 2/2007

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Abstract

Software development is fundamentally based on cognitive processes. Our motivating hypothesis is that amounts of various kinds of information in software artifacts may have useful statistical relationships with software-engineering attributes. This paper proposes measures of size, complexity and coupling in terms of the amount of information, building on formal definitions of these software-metric families proposed by Briand, Morasca, and Basili.

Ordinary graphs represent relationships between pairs of nodes. We extend prior work with ordinary graphs to hypergraphs representing relationships among sets of nodes. Some software engineering abstractions, such as set-use relations for public variables, are better represented as hypergraphs than ordinary (binary) graphs.

Traditional software metrics are based on counting. In contrast, we adopt information theory as the basis for measurement, because the design decisions embodied by software are information. This paper proposes software metrics of size, complexity, and coupling based on information in the pattern of incident hyperedges. For comparison, we also define corresponding counting-based metrics.

Three exploratory case studies illustrate some of the distinctive features of the proposed metrics. The case studies found that information theory-based software metrics make distinctions that counting metrics do not, which may be relevant to software engineering quality and process. We also identify situations when information theory-based metrics are simply proportional to corresponding counting metrics.

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As a simplifying assumption, our analysis excludes from measurement the design decisions of how many nodes and how many hyperedges the graph includes.

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Titel: Measuring size, complexity, and coupling of hypergraph abstractions of software: An information-theory approach
verfasst von: Edward B. Allen
Sampath Gottipati
Rajiv Govindarajan
Publikationsdatum: 01.06.2007
Verlag: Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers
Erschienen in: Software Quality Journal / Ausgabe 2/2007
Print ISSN: 0963-9314
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-1367
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-006-9010-3

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