Software Metrics: Measuring Haskell

Software metrics have been used in software engineering as a mechanism for assessing code quality and for targeting software development activities, such as testing or refactoring, at areas of a program that will most benefit from them. Haskell has many tools for software engineering, such as testing, debugging and refactoring tools, but software metrics have mostly been neglected. The work presented in this paper identifies a collection of software metrics for use with Haskell programs. These metrics are subjected to statistical analysis to assess the correlation between their values and the number of bug fixing changes occurring during the development lifetime of two case study programs. In addition to this, the relationships between the metric values is also explored, showing how combinations of metrics can be used to improve the accuracy of the measurements.