Similarity of Software System and Its Measurement Tool SMMT

摘要

Given two software systems, it is important to be able to objectively know how much those systems differ. However, it has not been easy to quantitatively measure the mutual differences between two systems. In this paper, the authors introduced similarity metrics for the similarity between software systems and the Similarity Metrics Measuring Tool (SMMT) for measuring them and applied SMMT to the source code of various UNIX-type operating systems. They also performed a cluster analysis from the similarities of the source code of those operating systems to create a dendogram and checked whether the operating systems were classified correctly. The results confirmed that the similarity was an effective index for determining operating system transitions and that the family tree that was obtained represented the classification of the operating systems according to their derivations.