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MetricsExplanation
A variety of plugins support measuring a suite of standard software engineering metrics in program code. Years of experience with automatic and interactive verification have taught Mobius PVE developers that, code which has a specific range of values for a set of well-understood metrics are indicative of program code that is easier to verify. Therefore, providing a plugin that performs metric static analysis is useful to Mobius PVE users.
Two metrics-related plugins ship with the current "gamma" version of the Mobius PVE: NCSS and Metrics.
JavaNCSS is a simple program that performs some very basic analysis of program source code. In particular, JavaNCSS counts the Non-Commenting Source Statements (NCSS) of Java source at the module and method level, as well as summarizing a variety of other tertiary data.
The NCSS plugin included with the Mobius PVE provides an extremely simple interface to triggering JavaNCSS from within Eclipse. Analysis is only supported at the project level, and the output of said analysis is provided within a read-only window containing the raw text output of Java NCSS.
As we gain more experience with and "tune" the Metrics plugin, it is expected that future versions of the Mobius PVE will not include the NCSS plugin.
The Metrics plugin, in addition to performing all of the actions that NCSS does, also is capable of analyzing source code for well-known metrics found in the software engineering literature. Also, metrics at the class and method level are summarized in a more useful contextual structured fashion, rather than in a plain text window. For example, when a given code construct is selected with the mouse, the Metrics reporting window automatically updates to reflect the metrics of that construct.
MOBIUS partners have not gained much hands-on experience in some of these more advanced kinds of metrics, like various kinds of code coupling analyses. Thus, there is little concrete evidence about the verifiability of code with respect to such metrics. In fact, as there is little scientific published data on such, the integration of verification and metrics tools in the Mobius PVE provides the foundation for new research in such.
Version: 3 Time: Tue Apr 1 18:25:42 2008 Author: dcochran (dcochran) IP: 193.1.132.32