  We report an investigation of data analysis methods derived from other
disciplines, which we applied to physics software systems. They concern the
analysis of inequality, trend analysis and the analysis of diversity. The
analysis of inequality exploits statistical methods originating from
econometrics; trend analysis is typical of economics and environmental
sciences; the analysis of diversity is based on concepts derived from ecology
and treats software as an ecosystem. To the best of our knowledge, this is an
innovative exploration, as we could not find track of previous use of these
methods in the experimental physics domains within the scope of the IEEE
Nuclear Science Symposium. We applied these methods in the context of Geant4
physics validation and Geant4 maintainability assessment.
