CodeRank: a new family of software metrics

The concept of pagerank has proved successful in allowing search engines to identify important pages in the World Wide Web. In this paper, we describe the application of the pagerank concept to the domain of software in order to derive a new family of metrics, CodeRank, which captures aspects of software not readily obtainable from other metrics. We have implemented a tool, CODERANKER, to compute values of CodeRank metrics using a full semantic model which we have developed. We present some results and discuss the use of CodeRank metrics in their interpretation.