The fractal dimension metric and its use to assess object-oriented software quality
MARCHESI, MICHELE;TONELLI, ROBERTO
2011-01-01
Abstract
We present a study were software systems are considered as complex networks which have a self-similar structure under a length-scale transformation. On such complex software networks we computed a self-similar coefficient, also known as fractal dimension, using "the box counting method". We analyzed various releases of the publically available Eclipse software systems, calculating the fractal dimension for twenty sub-projects, randomly chosen, for every release, as well as for each release as a whole. Our results display an overall consistency among the sub-projects and among all the analyzed releases. We found a very good correlation between the fractal dimension and the number of bugs for Eclipse and for twenty sub-projects. Since the fractal dimension is just a scalar number that characterizes a whole system, while complexity and quality metrics are in general computed on every system module, this result suggests that the fractal dimension could be considered as a global quality metric for large software systems. Our results need however to be confirmed for other large software systems.Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.