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Chapter 5. Growth Dynamics
Figure 5.13: NOB Gini profile for JabRef.
software systems quickly without a deep investigation of the source
code and source repository logs. Our personal experience from the two
audits was that the quick identification of the use of templates to generate
code in the first system helped us identify a key design element
of the solution at the beginning of our audit exercise allowing for more
effective use of our time since we eliminated the need to investigate
approximately 30% of the classes scattered across different packages.
5.5.8 Machine-generated Code
In our study we noticed that certain systems consistently exhibited
Number of Branches Gini values above 0.85. An investigation into those
unusually high values revealed the presence of machine-generated code,
specifically parsers and expression processors. These parsers typically
contain a few large classes that encapsulate very long methods
with abnormally high algorithmic density caused by many thousands
of branches that use of hundreds of variables. This is caused because
code generators often employ greedy strategies to map a given specification
to target code.
Systems that contain machine-generated code structures tend to have a
unique distribution profile, where Gini Coefficients tend to be close to 1
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