Methods for calculation and application of software code metrics: a Systematic Mapping Study

Systematic mapping study (SMS) is a methodology that provides a means to systematically analyze a research topic, in order to observe the overall research landscape and determine available studies, their amount, types, and results. A metric of a software product is expressed as a numeric value, defining a certain property of the program. Metrics are usually used to analyze sections of the source code of software applications. However, the value of a metric can be influenced by both design patterns, the style of writing the program by the developer, and code modification in order to artificially inflate the results of calculating metrics. All this makes metrics a non-trivial tool for evaluating software products, requiring their correct interpretation and application for practical tasks. In this paper, a systematic mapping of the literature was carried out in order to outline the current research landscape in this area, identify methods and means for practical use of code metrics for application analysis, including an overview of existing solutions. A corpus of relevant documents was formed and answers to the research questions were received. The distributions of publications by document type, geographical principle, and number of authors were constructed. The classification of research tasks using metrics and their sets was proposed. The dependencies between metrics, their sets, and programming languages were analyzed. The distributions of metrics and their sets for the problems to be solved were studied in accordance with the proposed classification.

Authors: A. O. Korznikov, N. N. Datsun

Direction: Informatics, Computer Technologies And Control

Keywords: systematic mapping study, software analysis, source code, code metric, application of code metrics

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