Study the impact of improving source code on software metrics

The process of improving the quality of the software products is a continuous process where software developers learn from their previous experience and from previous software releases to improve the future products or release. In this paper, we evaluate the ability of Software source code analysis process and tools to predict possible defects, errors or problem in the software products. More specifically, we evaluate the effect of improving the code according to recommendations from source code tools on software metrics. Several open source software projects are selected for the case study. The output of applying source code analysis tools on those projects result in several types of warning. After performing manual correction of those warning, we compare the metrics of the evaluated projects before and after applying the corrections. Results showed that the size and structural complexity in most cases are increases. On the other hand, some of the complexities related to coupling and maintainability are decreases.