Computer Science and
     Software Engineering

Computer Science and Software Engineering

TR-COSC 01/08

CodeRank: Extensions and Experiments

Janina Voigt
Department of Computer Science
University of Canterbury

Abstract

The CodeRank family of software metrics provides a new perspective on software structure which, by itself or in conjunction with other metrics, has many potential applications in software engineering. The work presented in this report involves evaluating and extending the CodeRank model and associated software tools. I explored the CodeRank model in greater detail than has been done before, including demonstrating that results obtained for specific software designs were consistent with predictions and clarifying the role and effect of relationship direction choices. I designed and conducted experiments to establish the effect of varying parameters such as the damping factor in order to establish their effects on the values obtained and the efficiency of the computation. Results are presented for some Java application code and some data capture, processing and presentation tools are described.