RTTool – A Tool for Extracting Relative Thresholds for Source Code Metrics

Description

Meaningful thresholds are essential for promoting source code metrics as an effective instrument to control the internal quality of software systems. Despite the increasing number of source code measurement tools, no publicly available tools support extraction of metric thresholds. Moreover, earlier studies suggest that in larger systems significant number of classes exceed recommended metric thresholds. Therefore, in our previous study we have introduced the notion of a relative threshold, i.e., a pair including an upper limit and a percentage of classes whose metric values should not exceed this limit. In this paper we propose RTTOOL, an open source tool for extracting relative thresholds from the measurement data of a benchmark of software systems.

Screencast

Slides

Installation Instructions

  1. Download and unzip the RTTool.zip
  2. To run the tool, use:
    java -jar -Xincgc rttool.jar

Dataset

The following dataset can be used to see RTTool in action.

QualitasCorpus.zip

SubcorpusTools.zip

Source Code

GitHub repositoty

Papers

  1. [PDF] Paloma Oliveira, Fernando Lima, Marco Tulio Valente, and Alexander Serebrenik. RTTOOL: A Tool for Extracting Relative Thresholds for Source Code Metrics. In 30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Tool Demo Track, pages 1-4, 2014. [Bibtex]

    @inproceedings{rttool, 
      author = {Paloma Oliveira and Fernando Lima and Marco Tulio Valente and Alexander Serebrenik}, 
      title = {{RTTOOL}: A Tool for Extracting Relative Thresholds for Source Code Metrics}, 
      booktitle = {30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Tool Demo Track}, 
      year = {2014}, 
      pages = {1--4}, 
    }
  2. [PDF] Paloma Oliveira, Marco Tulio Valente, and Fernando Lima. Extracting Relative Thresholds for Source Code Metrics. In IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE), pages 254-263, 2014. [Bibtex]
    @inproceedings{csmrwcre2014b,
      author = {Paloma Oliveira and Marco Tulio Valente and Fernando Lima}, 
      title = {Extracting Relative Thresholds for Source Code Metrics}, 
      booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Software Maintenance, Reengineering and Reverse Engineering (CSMR-WCRE)}, 
      year = {2014}, 
      pages = {254--263}, 
      pdf = {http://www.dcc.ufmg.br/~mtov/pub/2014_csmrwcre_thresholds.pdf} 
    }