Analyzing Software Artifacts through Singular Value Decomposition to Guide Development Decisions
Mark S. Sherriff · NCSU Libraries Repository (North Carolina State University Libraries) · 2007
During development, programming teams will produce numerous types of software development artifacts. A software development artifact is an intermediate or final product that is the result or by-product of software development. Hidden relationships and structures within a software system can be illuminated through singular value decomposition using software development artifacts, and these relationships can be leveraged to help guide software development questions regarding the interactions among software files. The goal of this research is to build and investigate a framework called Software Development Artifact Analysis (SDAA) that uses software development artifacts to illuminate underlying relationships within a system. SDAA provides guidelines for selecting and gathering software development artifacts, discovering relationships, and then leveraging the insights gained through the analysis of those relationships. We use singular value decomposition (SVD) to generate the relationships from a matrix of software development artifact metrics. In this research, we use SDAA to create three SVD-based software development analysis techniques: an impact analysis technique, a regression test prioritization technique,