PhD Research Proposal - Visualising Software Corpus Analysis

Despite the spread of software development and software usage, we have almost no dependable data on how software is actually written in practice. Understanding the shape of existing software is an important step to understanding what good software looks like. Our proposal is to undertake quantitative studies of the way software is actually written in practice and evolved over time by collecting large corpora of software in object-oriented and aspect-oriented programming languages. We will then create tools to produce visualisations of the structure and behaviour of the software using visualisation techniques to characterize each language’s characteristic patterns of usage and frequency. In other disciplines, e.g. applied linguistics [12], this kind of approach is well established. Our proposed kind of corpus analysis will expose how programmers actually use languages, what features of languages are used, and better inform programming pedagogy, software language design, and software understanding. A key observation leading to this proposal is that software that could comprise such corpora have become available for study only in the last decade. One source of corpora will be free and open-source software (FOSS) that is freely accessible over the Internet.