A Study of Software Functional Programming and Measurement

摘要

This paper presents an investigation into the usefulness of software measurement techniques, also known as software metrics, for software written in functional programming languages such as Haskell. Statistical analysis is performed on a selection of metrics for Haskell programs, some taken from the world of imperative languages. An attempt is made to assess the utility of various metrics in predicting likely places that bugs may occur in practice by correlating bug fixes with metric values within the change histories of a number of case study programs. This work also examines mechanisms for visualizing the results of the metrics and shows some proof of concept implementations for Haskell programs, and notes the usefulness of such tools in other software Engineering processes such as refactoring. This research makes the following contributions to the field of software engineering for functional programs. A collection of metrics for use with functional programs has been identified from the existing metrics used with other paradigms. The relationship between the metrics and the change history of a small collection of programs has been explored. The relationships between the individual metrics on a large collection of programs have been explored. Visualization tools have been developed for further exploring the metric values in conjunction with program source code.