Towards Modeling the User-perceived Quality of Source Code using Static Analysis Metrics

Valasia Dimaridou, Alexandros-Charalampos Kyprianidis, Michail Papamichail, Themistoklis Diamantopoulos, Andreas Symeonidis

2017

Abstract

Nowadays, software has to be designed and developed as fast as possible, while maintaining quality standards. In this context, developers tend to adopt a component-based software engineering approach, reusing own implementations and/or resorting to third-party source code. This practice is in principle cost-effective, however it may lead to low quality software products. Thus, measuring the quality of software components is of vital importance. Several approaches that use code metrics rely on the aid of experts for defining target quality scores and deriving metric thresholds, leading to results that are highly context-dependent and subjective. In this work, we build a mechanism that employs static analysis metrics extracted from GitHub projects and defines a target quality score based on repositories’ stars and forks, which indicate their adoption/acceptance by the developers’ community. Upon removing outliers with a one-class classifier, we employ Principal Feature Analysis and examine the semantics among metrics to provide an analysis on five axes for a source code component: complexity, coupling, size, degree of inheritance, and quality of documentation. Neural networks are used to estimate the final quality score given metrics from all of these axes. Preliminary evaluation indicates that our approach can effectively estimate software quality.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Dimaridou V., Kyprianidis A., Papamichail M., Diamantopoulos T. and Symeonidis A. (2017). Towards Modeling the User-perceived Quality of Source Code using Static Analysis Metrics . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-262-2, pages 73-84. DOI: 10.5220/0006420000730084

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft17,
author={Valasia Dimaridou and Alexandros-Charalampos Kyprianidis and Michail Papamichail and Themistoklis Diamantopoulos and Andreas Symeonidis},
title={Towards Modeling the User-perceived Quality of Source Code using Static Analysis Metrics},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2017},
pages={73-84},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006420000730084},
isbn={978-989-758-262-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Towards Modeling the User-perceived Quality of Source Code using Static Analysis Metrics
SN - 978-989-758-262-2
AU - Dimaridou V.
AU - Kyprianidis A.
AU - Papamichail M.
AU - Diamantopoulos T.
AU - Symeonidis A.
PY - 2017
SP - 73
EP - 84
DO - 10.5220/0006420000730084