A comparative study of spatial complexity metrics and their impact on maintenance effort

Maintenance is an important phase of software lifecycle. A significant fraction of overall effort and cost is consumed on comprehension and maintenance. Maintenance effort is highly correlated with spatial complexity of the system. The existing metrics for measuring spatial complexity are not suitable for all types of software systems. These metrics sometimes do not depict the effect of the key factors, which contribute significantly towards maintenance effort. In addition, most of these metrics are suitable for a specific type of a system. In this paper, the existing metrics have been studied and their application areas have been identified

[1]  Paul J. Layzell,et al.  Spatial complexity metrics: an investigation of utility , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[2]  Jeffrey O. Kephart,et al.  The Vision of Autonomic Computing , 2003, Computer.

[3]  Janez Brest,et al.  Software complexity-an alternative view , 1996, 1996 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. Information Intelligence and Systems (Cat. No.96CH35929).

[4]  Dilma Da Silva,et al.  Enabling autonomic behavior in systems software with hot swapping , 2003, IBM Syst. J..

[5]  Stephen H. Kan,et al.  Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering , 1994, SOEN.

[6]  James E. Tomayko,et al.  The structural complexity of software an experimental test , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[7]  Meir M. Lehman,et al.  Program evolution: processes of software change , 1985 .

[8]  Anas N. Al-Rabadi,et al.  A comparison of modified reconstructability analysis and Ashenhurst‐Curtis decomposition of Boolean functions , 2004 .

[9]  P. Oman,et al.  Maintainability measurements on industrial source code maintenance activities , 1995, Proceedings of International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[10]  K. K. Aggarwal,et al.  Code and data spatial complexity: two important software understandability measures , 2003, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[11]  Juergen Rilling,et al.  Identifying comprehension bottlenecks using program slicing and cognitive complexity metrics , 2003, 11th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension, 2003..

[12]  Maurice H. Halstead,et al.  Elements of software science , 1977 .

[13]  Paul J. Layzell,et al.  Spatial measures of software complexity , 1999, PPIG.

[14]  Rachel Harrison,et al.  An Investigation into the Applicability and Validity of Object-Oriented Design Metrics , 1998, Empirical Software Engineering.