Association of program size with indicators of complexity

An investigation of underlying factors in a collection of complexity measures applied to several sets of programs showed that the program size factor is the one most closely associated with these indicators of complexity: construction time, debugging time, and number of error occurrences. This finding provides support for software engineering practices such as partitioning a system into small modules and using estimates of software size to forecast software project effort, Hal-stead's E, a size-oriented measure, was a consistently good predictor of all three indicators of complexity.