Extracting and analyzing software code metrics from C# source code

In many software engineering areas, such as software maintenance and software measurement, source code analysis plays a key role. It represents a fundamental step to acquire data that set up the basis for different kind of analyses. Usually, a program is analyzed through static or dynamic analysis and the collected low level program information is abstracted into a higher level representation. Such abstraction layer should be general enough to allow different types of analyses. This paper proposes a high level representation to abstract object-oriented and procedural source code and presents an architecture and a tool to extract such representation from C# source code. As a proof of concept, an application in the domain of software measurement is presented.