In-depth measurement and analysis on densification power law of software execution

Abstract

Measuring software execution is important for many software engineering tasks. In this paper, Densification Power Law (DPL) of software execution is measured and studied as a feature of growing software complexity. Densification means that during a networked system's evolution, it usually becomes denser and the number of edges and nodes grows with a consistent super linear relation. This feature was discovered and reported in 2005. In this paper, based on a measurement of 15 open-source Java programs, we show that when software systems are modeled as a series of dynamic Call Graphs during their executions, they always obey DPL with very close correlation. Then a comparison between static Call Graph and DPL is presented, showing that DPL's properties cannot be derived statically. An explanation for DPL of software execution is given and verified. We believe the universality of DPL makes it an appropriate metric for software execution process.