thesis - Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies ...
thesis - Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies ...
thesis - Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies ...
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Chapter 4. Measuring Evolving S<strong>of</strong>tware<br />
Jar Extractor Class Metric Extractor Merge Inner Classes<br />
Graph Metric<br />
Extraction<br />
Inheritance Metric<br />
Extraction<br />
Dependency Graph<br />
Construction<br />
Figure 4.5: The metric extraction process for each release <strong>of</strong> a s<strong>of</strong>tware<br />
system<br />
Our definition <strong>of</strong> Days places it on the ratio scale <strong>of</strong> measurement since<br />
we clearly define the zero value [77], permitting the use <strong>of</strong> Days in common<br />
mathematical operations <strong>and</strong> statistical techniques. Although, we<br />
avoid using the Release Sequence Number as a measure <strong>of</strong> time in the<br />
models that we construct, we use RSN as a measure <strong>of</strong> time when visually<br />
illustrating patterns <strong>of</strong> evolution in a single system, specifically<br />
to highlight key versions where changes take place. However, we do not<br />
use RSN when comparing different s<strong>of</strong>tware systems, since the intervals<br />
between releases across systems need not be the same.<br />
4.5 Metric Extraction<br />
We extract the measures for each class in the Java program by processing<br />
the compiled class files. As discussed in the previous chapter<br />
(cf. Section 3.6.2), this approach allows us to avoid running a potentially<br />
complex build process for each release. The steps in the metric<br />
extraction process is presented visually in Figure 4.5 <strong>and</strong> elaborated in<br />
greater detail in the rest <strong>of</strong> this section.<br />
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