Empirical Analysis of the Correlation between Amount of Reuse Metrics in the C Programming Language

In recent years, there have been several proposals for amount-of-reuse metrics. However, it is not often clear if these metrics measure anything different than already used software metrics, or what the relations between these metrics really are. Without this, the true added value provided by each metric is unknown. In this paper, an analysis of the existing amount-of-reuse metrics is presented and a portion of them are selected on the basis of their industrial applicability. These metrics are then applied to a collection of public domain software products, to obtain an understanding of the level of correlation that exists between them and other well known software metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, volume and lines of code. Through this process we find that a subset of the selected amount-of-reuse metrics provide a relatively independent view of the analysed code.