jCT: A Java Code Tomograph

We are concerned with analyzing software, in particular, with its nature and how developer decisions and behavior impact the quality of the product they produce. This is the domain of empirical software engineering where measurement seeks to capture attributes affecting the product, process, and resources of software development. A well-established means to study software attributes is metrics data mining. But, even though a variety of frameworks have emerged that can distill desired measures from software systems (e.g., JHawk or SonarJ), a systematic approach to collecting measures from large data sets has still eluded us. For this reason, we have developed the Java Code Tomograph (jCT), a novel framework for metrics extraction and processing. jCT offers an extensible measurement infrastructure with built-in support for the curated repositories Qualitas Corpus and Helix. With jCT, large-scale empirical studies of code within the same software system or across different software systems become feasible. In this paper, we provide an overview of jCT's main design features and discuss its operation in relation to the effectiveness of the framework.