This project was originally an MSc project. This document is a short description of the original MSc work. Project activities included:
At the end of 1998, work towards the MSc award was completed, and a final draft of the thesis was prepared for submission. As a result of encouragement from reviewers of this draft, it was agreed that the project would be upgraded to PhD level, with additional work to be undertaken as described in this proposal. The proposal includes a detailed retrospective review of the work undertaken as part of the initial MSc project.
The project was upgraded to PhD level in 1999. The most significant part of the extension to the original MSc project was an experiment which sought to detect a benefit from the availability of metrics information in the performance of a simulated software code review. Volunteers were sought over the Internet to perform the review exercise. This document describes the design and outcomes of the experiment.
The thesis arising out of this work has is available here. There is also a Powerpoint presentation relating to the project. Some of the slides from the presentation are reproduced as GIFs at the end of the document relating to the PhD experiment.
The analyzer developed as part of the project is called CCCC. It is still under active development, see the project page at http://cccc.sourceforge.net.