CYCLOMATIC COMPLEXITY DENSITY AND SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE PRODUCTIVITY

While the need for software metrics to aid in the assessment of software complexity for maintenance has been widely argued, little agreement has been reached on the appropriateness and value of any single metric. McCabe's cyclomatic complexity metric, a measure of the maximum number of linearly independent circuits in a program control graph, has been widely used in research. The current research validates previously raised concerns about the metric on a new data set. However, a simple transformation of the metric is investigated whereby the cyclomatic complexity is divided by the size of the system in source statements, thereby determining a "complexity density" ratio. This complexity density ratio is demonstrated to be a useful predictor of software maintenance productivity on a small pilot sample of actual maintenance projects.