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Software metrics measure various attributes of a piece of software and are becoming essential for a variety of purposes, including software quality evaluation. One type of measurement is based on source code evaluation. Many tools have been developed to perform source code analysis or to measure various metrics, but most use different metrics definitions, leading to inconsistencies in measurement results. The metrics measured by these tools also vary by programming language. We propose a unified framework for measuring source code that supports multiple programming languages. In this paper, we present commonalities of measurable elements from various programming languages as the foundation for developing the framework. We then describe the approach used within the framework and also its preliminary development. We believe that our approach can solve the problems with existing measurement tools.
Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, 2014/02/03
This paper make explicit the problem of having consistent measurements across programming languages. It starts by observing three problems with the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice:
It recall that several tools exist and name a few of them (but not PADL…)
However, the paper does not raise the problem of dealing with the dependencies among heterogeneous components, i.e., components written in different programming languages.