A stochastic model of software maintenance and its implications on extreme programming processes
Extreme programming examined
A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Power-Laws in a Large Object-Oriented Software System
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Threats on building models from CVS and Bugzilla repositories: the Mozilla case study
CASCON '07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference of the center for advanced studies on Collaborative research
Do Crosscutting Concerns Cause Defects?
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Assessing traditional and new metrics for object-oriented systems
Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Metrics
A modified Yule process to model the evolution of some object-oriented system properties
Information Sciences: an International Journal
The fractal dimension of software networks as a global quality metric
Information Sciences: an International Journal
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We present a study were software systems are considered as complex networks which have a self-similar structure under a length-scale transformation. On such complex software networks we computed a self-similar coefficient, also known as fractal dimension, using "the box counting method". We analyzed various releases of the publically available Eclipse software systems, calculating the fractal dimension for twenty sub-projects, randomly chosen, for every release, as well as for each release as a whole. Our results display an overall consistency among the sub-projects and among all the analyzed releases. We found a very good correlation between the fractal dimension and the number of bugs for Eclipse and for twenty sub-projects. Since the fractal dimension is just a scalar number that characterizes a whole system, while complexity and quality metrics are in general computed on every system module, this result suggests that the fractal dimension could be considered as a global quality metric for large software systems. Our results need however to be confirmed for other large software systems.