Dealing with Software Metrics Collection and Analysis: a Relational Approach

The area of software metrics is constantly changing. New measures are proposed every day and tools for data collection and analysis have to be updated frequently in order to handle changes. A possible approach to reduce the number of changes and their complexity is the use of an intermediate layer able to decouple the extraction and the analysis of the information. In this way, researchers do not have to deal with language parsing concepts such as declarations, class specifiers, and base clauses. They focus only on the information analysis such as metrics definition and extraction. This paper proposes an abstraction layer and an architecture supporting metrics collection and analysis. The proposed layer is a set of relations able to describe the structure of the source code. As a proof of concept, the paper describes the design and the implementation of WebMetrics, a tool implementing such technique. WebMetrics is part of PROM (PRO Metrics), an architecture designed to collect and analyze software metrics and Personal Software Process data.