TDTool

Software metrics provide basic means to quantify quality of software systems. However, the effectiveness of the measurement process is directly dependent on the definition of reliable thresholds. If thresholds are not properly defined, it is difficult to know, for instance, whether a given metric value indicates a potential problem in a class implementation. There are several methods proposed in literature to derive thresholds for software metrics. However, most of these methods (i) do not respect the skewed distribution of software metrics and (ii) do not provide a supporting tool. Aiming to fill the second gap, we propose a tool, called TDTool, to derive metric thresholds. TDTool is open source and supports four different methods for threshold derivation. This paper presents TDTool architecture and illustrates how to use it. It also presents the thresholds derived using each method based on a benchmark of 33 software product lines.