Automatic program analysis and evaluation
Marvin V. Zelkowitz · 1976
There is currently considerable interest in the computing community in the evaluation of computer programming. However, in order to objectively evaluate such concepts, it is necessary to undertake a thorough evaluation of the programming process itself. Most previous studies of this type have analyzed, by hand usually, a few instances of programs. This has led to some general conjectures; however, the amount of information that must be processed precludes any large scale analysis. In order to avoid this problem, an automatic data collection facility has been implemented as part of ~a PL/I compiler at the University of Maryland. This system automatically collects information on each program that has been compiled- at almost no additional cost to the user of the compiler~ This paper will describe the system and will evaluate some of the characteristics of some of the 25,000 programs that have been run since July, 1975.