The Empirical Analysis of Function-Call Graph

The relationship of function calling is the core of understanding and maintaining software systems for engineers, but so far there have been so little studies concentrating on this aspect. In this paper we presented a comprehensive study of analyzing the software systems at the function level with complex network theory, expecting for providing guidance to the maintaining and controlling of systems. We selected a simple scripting language Lua whose code is in appropriate size for complexity analysis mainly in degree distribution and community detection, and found the heavy-tail and high clustering phenomenon.