RTTOOL: A Tool for Extracting Relative Thresholds for Source Code Metrics (ICSME 2014, Tools Track)

Meaningful thresholds are essential for promoting source code metrics as an effective instrument to control the internal quality of software systems. Despite the increasing number of source code measurement tools, no publicly available tools support extraction of metric thresholds. Moreover, earlier studies suggest that in larger systems significant number of classes exceed recommended metric thresholds. Therefore, in our previous study we have introduced the notion of a relative threshold, i.e., a pair including an upper limit and a percentage of classes whose metric values should not exceed this limit. In this paper we propose RTTOOL, an open source tool for extracting relative thresholds from the measurement data of a benchmark of software systems. RTTOOL is publicly available at http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/rttool

Transcript

1. A Tool for Extracting Relative Thresholds
   for Source Code Metrics
   APPLIED SOFTWARE
   ENGINEERING RESEARCH
   GROUP
   /
   Federal Institute
   Minas Gerais
   Paloma Oliveira @PalomaFormiga
   Fernando P. Lima
   Marco Túlio Valente @mtov
   Alexander Serebrenik @aserebrenik
   

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3. ?
   

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4. ?
   Unavoidable!
   

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5. Relative Thresholds
   Paloma Oliveira, Marco Tulio Valente,
   Fernando Paim Lima: Extracting relative
   thresholds for source code metrics.
   CSMR-WCRE 2014: 254-263
   For metric M,
   p% of the entities should not exceed k
   84%
   94%
   

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6. 84%
   94%
   For metric M,
   p% of the entities should not
   exceed k
   MAX
   MIN
   

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7. Demo
   

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8. Applicability
   • Class-level metrics
   • Low better than high
   • Heavy-tailed
   ✓ (S)LOC, NOA, NOM, FAN-OUT, RFC, WMC…
   ✗ DIT, Dn
   

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9. http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/rttool/
   

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