Browsing by Subject "Computer software -- Development -- Reliability"
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Item Static analysis of fundamental computer science student programs(Texas Tech University, 1998-05) Ulans, Joseph V.;While there has been substantial work focused on dynamic metrics, much less work has been done with static metrics. This investigation explores the relationship between the values for a set of metrics collected from C++ programs done by students enrolled in an introductory programming course at Texas Tech University. Three groups of programs prepared in response to three programming assignments were evaluated. A variety of static metrics commonly used to assess style and complexity were used. In addition to those, the code coverage of sample input was measured dynamically. A readily available commercial software package was used to calculate the metric values. The values were then analyzed using linear regression to evaluate the extent of correlation between them. While some metrics showed no meaningful correlation, a strong correlation was observed between each of the number of statements, number of operators, number of operands, and the McCabe cyclomatic complexity value.Item Static analysis of novice student C++ programs(Texas Tech University, 1998-05) Yerramilli, VinayThe primary objective of the thesis research is to help to improve the instruction quality for the Computer Science Department's CS 1462 Fundamentals of Computer Science I course at Texas Tech University. Improving the instructional quality means making changes in the method/mode of instruction so that the students become better programmers. Two among many features identified as necessary for a good programmer. are the ability to write programs with good understandability and good quality. Therefore, understandability and quality are the two attributes of the student programs which are measured to achieve the final objective. To achieve the above objective, 90 programs were chosen from the class for analysis. An estimate of the quality and the understandability of the programs was made by visual inspection of the code. These values were used as output variables for performing linear and multivariate regression analysis on the collected metrics, such as McCabe's cyclomatic complexity, number of functions, average statement size, and documentation per statement. Significant correlations were found among the metrics and the quality and understandability rankings of the programs. The results may be used by instructors to assess student programs and by students to compare themselves to programs rated with higher quality and understandability rankings.