HackerPapers

arXiv:0905.2288cs.SE

The Distribution of Program Sizes and Its Implications: An Eclipse Case Study

Hongyu Zhang, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Michele Marchesi

HN submission. Found in a submission link or body. Submitters do not count as commenters in the main ranking; a submission is not an endorsement.

Abstract

A large software system is often composed of many inter-related programs of different sizes. Using the public Eclipse dataset, we replicate our previous study on the distribution of program sizes. Our results confirm that the program sizes follow the lognormal distribution. We also investigate the implications of the program size distribution on size estimation and quality predication. We find that the nature of size distribution can be used to estimate the size of a large Java system. We also find that a small percentage of largest programs account for a large percentage of defects, and the number of defects across programs follows the Weibull distribution when the programs are ranked by their sizes. Our results show that the distribution of program sizes is an important property for understanding large and complex software systems.

arXiv comments
10 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.SESoftware Engineering cs.PLProgramming Languages

On Hacker News

No comments linking this paper were found in the collected sources. Found in 1 HN submission from May 2009 to May 2009. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments0 threads

No comments linking this paper were found in the collected sources. Open submission discussions.

Submitted to Hacker News

  • Ask HN: Seeking reference or paper on Unit Testing for Large Programs / Codes3 points0 comments

    One of my interest is finding sparsity in large sets so that it can eventually be detected using compressive sensing. An example of that for instance is bugs in software as shown in this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.2288 as mentioned in http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23548/ I have seen several times, that in order to catch errors, some folks seem to go through what I have seen defined as unit testing. With programs getting larger and larger, one is obviously looking at a…

Connected through shared HN threads, not inferred similarity or a recommendation.