Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Allen, Edward B.

Committee Member

Dampier, David A.

Committee Member

Vaughn, Rayford B.

Date of Degree

5-10-2003

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Computer Science

Degree Name

Master of Science

College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

Department

Department of Computer Science

Abstract

Software designs consist of software components and their relationships. Graphs are abstraction of software designs. Graphs composed of nodes and hyperedges are attractive for depicting software designs. Measurement of abstractions quantify relationships that exist among components. Most conventional metrics are based on counting. In contrast, this work adopts information theory because design decisions are information. The goal of this research is to show that information theory-based metrics proposed by Allen, namely size, complexity, coupling, and cohesion, can be useful in real-world software development projects, compared to the counting-based metrics. The thesis includes three case studies with the use of global variables as the abstraction. It is observed that one can use the counting metrics for the size and coupling measures and the information metrics for the complexity and cohesion measures.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/21091

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