Data linkage maps
Martin Neil, Richard Bache · Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice · 1993
Abstract Most work in software metrics has been aimed at measuring the quality or cost of software. This paper gives an example of how metrics may be used to give information about how the software system is organized, specifically the data linkage between procedures in the source code. The data linkage measures capture how closely procedures are bound together by data flowing between them. The paper shows how data linkage within a program can be represented in a diagrammatic form. This approach makes use of multivariate statistics and is applied to two examples. Results are then compared with the authors' intuitions of how the example programs are organized. This approach could be used as an automatic aid to maintainers.