Software metrics collection: Two new research tools

Collecting software metrics manually could be a tedious, inaccurate, and subjective task. Two new tools were developed to automate this process in a rapid, accurate, and objective way. The first tool, the Metrics Analyzer, evaluates 19 metrics at the function level, from complete or partial systems written in C. The second tool, the Call Graph Generator, does not assess a metric directly, but generates a call graph based on a complete or partial system written in C. The call graph is used as an input to another tool (not considered here) that measures the coupling of a module, such as a function or a file. A case study analyzed the relationships among the metrics, including the coupling metric, using principal component analysis, which transformed the 19 metrics into eight principal components.