Complexity Measures for System Development Models

This paper discusses mechanisms to measure the inherent complexity of the formative stages of the software development process. The techniques presented concentrate on two major specification and design modelling techniques, namely hierarchy and network diagrams, which may be found in many current structured development methods. The measurement of hierarchy models considers the level of nesting or inherited complexity of processing activity. The measurement of network models considers the implicit complexity of the information flows terminating at and emanating from processes.

[1]  Michael Marcotty,et al.  A genealogy of control structures , 1975, CACM.

[2]  Dennis G. Kafura,et al.  The Use of Software Complexity Metrics in Software Maintenance , 1987, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[3]  Norman Fenton Software measurement and analysis: a case study in collaborative research , 1989, [1989] Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Volume II: Software Track.

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

[5]  Sallie M. Henry,et al.  Software Structure Metrics Based on Information Flow , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[6]  Norman E. Fenton,et al.  Software Metrics: A Rigorous Approach , 1991 .

[7]  M. Shepperd,et al.  A critique of cyclomatic complexity as a software metric , 1988, Softw. Eng. J..

[8]  Hiroyuki Sato,et al.  Practice of quality modeling and measurement on software life-cycle , 1990, [1990] Proceedings. 12th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[9]  H. E. Dunsmore,et al.  Software engineering metrics and models , 1986 .

[10]  Martin Shepperd Design metrics: an empirical analysis , 1990 .

[11]  Elaine Ferneley,et al.  Design Metrics as an Aid to Cost Estimation , 1994 .

[12]  Glenford J. Myers,et al.  Composite/structured design , 1978 .

[13]  Martin Shepperd,et al.  Early life-cycle metrics and software quality models. , 1990 .

[14]  Robin J. Wilson Introduction to Graph Theory , 1974 .

[15]  Ian Sommerville,et al.  Software Engineering — ESEC '93 , 1993, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.