When a software measure is not a measure
Software Engineering Journal
ACM '85 Proceedings of the 1985 ACM annual conference on The range of computing : mid-80's perspective: mid-80's perspective
On the Length of Programs for Computing Finite Binary Sequences: statistical considerations
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Software Complexity: Measures and Methods
Software Complexity: Measures and Methods
Elements of Software Science (Operating and programming systems series)
Elements of Software Science (Operating and programming systems series)
Evolving good hierarchical decompositions of complex systems
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal - Special issue on evolutionary computing
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
On a measure of program structure
Programming Symposium, Proceedings Colloque sur la Programmation
Foundations of Sequence-Based Software Specification
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
ICSE '76 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Software engineering
On a measure of program structure.
On a measure of program structure.
Quantitative Information Flow, Relations and Polymorphic Types
Journal of Logic and Computation
The Current State and Future of Search Based Software Engineering
FOSE '07 2007 Future of Software Engineering
Search Based Software Engineering for Program Comprehension
ICPC '07 Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension
A Measure of Computational Work
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
Quantitative information flow as network flow capacity
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
Visually Summarising Software Change
IV '08 Proceedings of the 2008 12th International Conference Information Visualisation
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Studying software evolution using artefacts' shared information content
Science of Computer Programming
Measuring multi-language software evolution: a case study
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution and the 7th annual ERCIM Workshop on Software Evolution
Evaluating agent-oriented programs: towards multi-paradigm metrics
ProMAS'10 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Programming Multi-Agent Systems
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To be able to examine software evolution - variation in software over a sequence of releases - or to compare differing versions of software with each other, we need to be able to measure artefacts representative of the software or its creation process. One can find in the literature a multitude of approaches to both measuring software - by defining and applying software metrics - and to examining software evolution in terms of these metrics. In this position paper, we claim that information content, specifically the (relative) Kolmogorov complexity, is the correct and fundamental tool for the measurement of software artefacts. Experimental results obtained from an analysis of the project udev demonstrate utility: future work should explore the breadth of applicability and determine the full scope of the approach.