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A Hybrid Set of Complexity Metrics for Large-Scale Object-Oriented Software Systems

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Abstract

Large-scale object-oriented (OO) software systems have recently been found to share global network characteristics such as small world and scale free, which go beyond the scope of traditional software measurement and assessment methodologies. To measure the complexity at various levels of granularity, namely graph, class (and object) and source code, we propose a hierarchical set of metrics in terms of coupling and cohesion — the most important characteristics of software, and analyze a sample of 12 open-source OO software systems to empirically validate the set. Experimental results of the correlations between cross-level metrics indicate that the graph measures of our set complement traditional software metrics well from the viewpoint of network thinking, and provide more effective information about fault-prone classes in practice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Lab of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Yu-Tao Ma (Member, CCF, ACM), Ke-Qing He (Senior Member, CCF, IEEE), Bing Li (Senior Member, CCF), Jing Liu & Xiao-Yan Zhou

  2. Complex Networks Research Center, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Yu-Tao Ma (Member, CCF, ACM), Ke-Qing He (Senior Member, CCF, IEEE), Bing Li (Senior Member, CCF) & Jing Liu

  3. Institute of Electronic System Engineering, Beijing, 100141, China

    Yu-Tao Ma (Member, CCF, ACM)

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  1. Yu-Tao Ma
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  2. Ke-Qing He
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Correspondence to Yu-Tao Ma.

Additional information

An early version has been published in the proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT 2006).

Supported by the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2007CB310800, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 60873083 and 60803025, the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant No. 20090141120022, the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province of China under Grant Nos. 2008ABA379 and 2008CDB351, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant No. 6082005.

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Ma, YT., He, KQ., Li, B. et al. A Hybrid Set of Complexity Metrics for Large-Scale Object-Oriented Software Systems. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 25, 1184–1201 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-010-9398-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-010-9398-x

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