Complexity measure based on requirement engineering document and its validation

The various complexity measure established so far are based on code and cognitive value of the software. It is established that a high quality SRS is pre requisite for high quality software, hence this work attempts to empirically demonstrate that the complexity of the code to be produced can be determined based on IEEE software requirement specification document (IEEE 830–1993). Considering the shortcoming of code based approaches, the proposed approach is able to compute the complexity of yet to be coded software immediately after freezing the requirement in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) process. Results obtained show that the complexity values are comparable with other established measures and hence the complexity of the software to be produced could be computed from SRS documents. Its validity is established by evaluating proposed measure against Weyuker properties.