Measurement of object-oriented software spatial complexity

One of the important activities of the maintenance phase is to understand the source-code first, and then change it. Understandability of the software gets affected by psychological complexity of the source-code and cognitive abilities are needed to understand it. The correlation between the orientation and location of various entities with their processing needs to be established by the programmers, which requires spatial abilities. These spatial abilities play an important role in object-oriented software, in which the use of data as well as the methods of the class needs to be understood in a combined way. This paper presents two measures of spatial complexity of object-oriented software, which are based on definition and usage of classes and objects. The values of proposed measures get affected suitably because of inheritance and polymorphism as well, due to change in the distances. The significance of object-oriented spatial complexity has been demonstrated with the help of 15 object-oriented projects of varied length and results have been validated with the help of reverse engineering data and perfective maintenance data. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.