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Selected publications by date
Selected publications by category
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Empirical Studies of Control Dependence Graphs Size for C
Programs
Empirical Software Engineering Journal
vol. 3, March 1998, pp 203-211
Mary Jean Harrold, James A. Jones, and Gregg Rothermel
Abstract
Many tools and techniques for performing
software engineering tasks require control
dependence information, represented in
the form of control dependence graphs.
Worst-case analysis of these graphs has shown
that their size may be quadratic in the number
of statements in the procedure that they represent.
Despite this result, two empirical studies suggest
that in practice, the relationship between control
dependence graph size and program size is linear.
These studies, however, were performed on a
relatively small number of Fortran procedures, all
of which were derived from numerical methods programs.
To further investigate control dependence size,
we implemented tools for constructing the two most
popular types of control dependence graphs,
and ran our tools on over 3000 C functions
extracted from a wide range of source programs.
Our results support the earlier conclusions
about control dependence graph size, and also
suggest that the difference in size between the
two types of control dependence graph is insignificant.
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