The Shape of Code

Conditional statements are a fundamental constituent of programs. Conditions are driven by the requirements of the problem being solved, e.g., if the water level is below the minimum, then add more water. As the problem being solved gets more complicated, dependencies between subproblems grow, requiring an increasing number of situations to be checked.

A condition contains one or more clauses, e.g., a single clause in: if (a==1), and two clauses in: if ((x==y) && (z==3)); a condition also appears as the termination test in a for-loop.

How many conditions containing one clause will a 10,000 line program contain? What will be the distribution of the number of clauses in conditions?

A while back I read a paper studying this problem (“What to expect of predicates: An empirical analysis of predicates in real world programs”; Google currently not finding a copy online, grrr, you will have to hassle the first author: durelli@icmc.usp.br, or perhaps it will get added to a list of favorite publications {be nice, they did publish some very interesting data}) it contained a table of numbers and yesterday my analysis of the data revealed a surprising pattern.

The data consists of SLOC, number of files and number of conditions containing a given number of clauses, for 63 Java programs. The following plot shows percentage of conditionals containing a given number of clauses (code+data):

The fitted equation, for the number of conditionals containing a given number of clauses, is:

where: (the coefficient for the fitted regression model is 0.56, but square-root is easier to remember), , and is the number of clauses.

The fitted regression model is not as good when or is always used.

This equation is an emergent property of the code; simply merging files to increase the average length will not change the distribution of clauses in conditionals.

When , all conditionals contain the same number of clauses, off to infinity. For the 63 Java programs, the mean was 2,625, maximum 11,710, and minimum 172.

I was expecting SLOC to have an impact, but was not expecting number of files to be involved.

What grows with SLOC? Number of global variables and number of dependencies. There are more things available to be checked in larger programs, and an increase in dependencies creates the need to perform more checks. Also, larger programs are likely to contain more special cases, which are likely to involve checking both general and specific values (i.e., more clauses in conditionals); ok, this second sentence is a bit more arm-wavy than the first. The prediction here is that the percentage of global variables appearing in conditions increases with SLOC.

Chopping stuff up into separate files has a moderating effect. Since I did not expect this, I don’t have much else to say.

This model explains 74% of the variance in the data (impressive, if I say so myself). What other factors might be involved? Depth of nesting would be my top candidate.

Removing non-if-statement related conditionals from the count would help clarify things (I don’t expect loop-controlling conditions to be related to amount of code).

Two interesting data-sets in one week, with 10-days still to go until Christmas 🙂

Update: Fitting the same equation to the data from a later paper by the same group, based on mobile applications written in Swift and Objective-C, also produces a well-fitted regression model (apart from the term specifying an interactions between and ).

Update: Thanks to Frank Busse for reminding me of the FAA report An Investigation of Three Forms of the Modified Condition Decision Coverage (MCDC) Criterion, which contains detailed information on the 20,256 conditionals in five Ada programs. The number of conditionals containing a given number of clauses is fitted by a power law (exponent is approximately -3).