Common coupling and pointer variables, with application to a Linux case study

Stephen R. Schach; Tokunbo O.S. Adeshiyan; Daniel Balasubramanian; Gabor Madl; Esteban P. Osses; Sameer Singh; Karlkim Suwanmongkol; Minhui Xie; Dror G. Feitelson

doi:10.1007/s11219-006-9005-0

Common coupling and pointer variables, with application to a Linux case study

Stephen R. Schach^*, Tokunbo O.S. Adeshiyan, Daniel Balasubramanian, Gabor Madl, Esteban P. Osses, Sameer Singh, Karlkim Suwanmongkol, Minhui Xie, Dror G. Feitelson

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Both common coupling and pointer variables can exert a deleterious effect on the quality of software. The situation is exacerbated when global variables are assigned to pointer variables, that is, when an alias to a global variable is created. When this occurs, the number of global variables increases, and it becomes considerably harder to compute quality metrics correctly. However, unless aliasing is taken into account, variables may incorrectly appear to be unreferenced (neither defined nor used), or to be used without being defined. These ideas are illustrated by means of a case study of common coupling in the Linux kernel.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	99-113
Number of pages	15
Journal	Software Quality Journal
Volume	15
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-006-9005-0
State	Published - Mar 2007
Externally published	Yes

Keywords

Aliasing
Common coupling
Definition-use analysis
Global variables
Linux
Pointer variables

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10.1007/s11219-006-9005-0

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AU - Xie, Minhui

AU - Feitelson, Dror G.

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AB - Both common coupling and pointer variables can exert a deleterious effect on the quality of software. The situation is exacerbated when global variables are assigned to pointer variables, that is, when an alias to a global variable is created. When this occurs, the number of global variables increases, and it becomes considerably harder to compute quality metrics correctly. However, unless aliasing is taken into account, variables may incorrectly appear to be unreferenced (neither defined nor used), or to be used without being defined. These ideas are illustrated by means of a case study of common coupling in the Linux kernel.

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Common coupling and pointer variables, with application to a Linux case study

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Keywords

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