Empirically Examining the Quality of Source Code in Engineering Software Systems

In Engineering and Scientific computing, a significant number of software systems that are being commonly used by the Engineering community are developed and deployed as Open Source Systems (OSS). This collaborative development model has been widely accepted in both academia and industry. As these systems are typically developed by developers who are experts in their fields (e.g., Engineering), some of those programmers may be lacking an essential skillset today's software quality and engineering concepts (e.g., source code maintainability and analyzability, source code vulnerability, parallelization, etc.). An empirical study is presented that examines some of the source code quality aspects and programming practices (e.g., jumps statements, usage of recursion) from software engineering perspective in ten open source Engineering software systems. The studied systems are written in the C/C++ programming languages and comprised of over ten million lines of code, and present numerous tasks of the engineering community, including computer-aided design, computational fluid dynamics, and finite element analysis. Static analysis methods are applied to each system to determine the number of jump statements (Goto and Break statements) and functions that are recursively invoked. Functions that contain direct or indirect recursive calls are determined and counted. The results show that number of the used jump statements and functions that have recursive calls are significant and thus pose more of a roadblock to effectively and automatically maintain, comprehend, analyze, and re-engineer systems. Lastly, this leads to inefficiencies in a software engineer's ability to accomplish these common tasks. The study showed that issues in source code stemming from the lack of coding standards have increased over time and are prevalent.