Observing Distributions in Size Metrics: Experience from Analyzing Large Software Systems

In this paper we observe and compare distributions of popular size metric values from the analysis of different software systems as well as from different consecutive versions of one software system. The typically heavy-tailed distributions are visualized and discussed with the help of Pareto diagrams. We found that the distributions remain remarkable stable over time, support the identification of problem areas by statistical and relative threshold-based filtering, and show the ability to reveal the fundamental characteristics of a software system.