DR-Tools: a suite of lightweight open-source tools to measure and visualize Java source code
This provides tools for software developers to improve code maintenance and evolution, but it is incremental as it builds on existing metric analysis approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing Java source code for maintenance and evolution by introducing DR-Tools Suite, a set of lightweight open-source tools that calculate metrics and visualize results, with feedback collected from academic and industrial case studies.
In Software Engineering, some of the most critical activities are maintenance and evolution. However, to perform both with quality, minimizing impacts and risks, developers need to analyze and identify where the main problems come from previously. In this paper, we introduce DR-Tools Suite, a set of lightweight open-source tools that analyze and calculate source code metrics, allowing developers to visualize the results in different formats and graphs. Also, we define a set of heuristics to help the code analysis. We conducted two case studies (one academic and one industrial) to collect feedback on the tools suite, on how we will evolve the tools, as well as insights to develop new tools that support developers in their daily work.