Two experiments on a program complexity perception by programmers

A group of graduate and undergraduate students and two experienced professional programmers are asked to assign complexity values to a series of programs. Analysis of variance is applied to investigate a possible existence of a relationship between programmer assigned comr plexity to programs and the number of runs to complete a program.(3,5) I t is also tested by analysis of variance i f the time spent to debug a program is correlated with programmer assigned complexity. The statis t ical package SAS(1) is used in the analysis. High values of correlation are found in both of the experiments.