Theory of relative defect proneness
Empirical Software Engineering
Software quality analysis by combining multiple projects and learners
Software Quality Control
Complexity measures in 4GL environment
ICCSA'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Computational science and Its applications - Volume Part V
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Software metrics are often supposed to give valuable information for the development of software. In this paper we focus on several common internal metrics: Lines of Code, number of comments, Halstead Volume and McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity. We try to find relations between these internal software metrics and metrics of software dependability: Probability of Failure on Demand and number of defects. The research is done using 59 specifications from a programming competition-The Online Judge-on the internet. Each specification provides us between 111 and 11,495 programs for our analysis; the total number of programs used is 71,917. We excluded those programs that consist of a look-up table. The results for the Online Judge programs are: (1) there is a very strong correlation between Lines of Code and Halstead Volume; (2) there is an even stronger correlation between Lines of Code and McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity; (3) none of the internal software metrics makes it possible to discern correct programs from incorrect ones; (4) given a specification, there is no correlation between any of the internal software metrics and the software dependability metrics.