Horst Zuse: Software Complexity - Measures and Methods

Publisher: Please order the book by Dr. Horst Zuse

605 pages, 498 figures

Overview

High software costs and the fact that more than 65% of the software life-cycle time is spent on testing and maintenance has created a considerable attention to the software complexity problem. Over the last decade many software complexity measures have been proposed by researchers. These measures are being used for analyzing software complexity, software understandability, software modifiability, software testability, software maintenance and for software development. The central goal of this textbook is to provide readers with the necessary knowledge and tools for critically evaluating existing and future software complexity measures. This book shall help scientists, teachers, students and engineers of software departments to understand software measurement in theory and apply software measures in practice. The book presents three major ways to discuss software complexity measures.

The first one is a theoretical treatment of how measurement theory can be used to assess software complexity measures. The problem interpreting the results of a software measurement process, the methods of the application of measurement theory, the definition and use of scales, the description of measures as an ordinal or ratio scale, and the methods of the correct interpreting of the meaning of the numbers are presented.

The second one is a detailed analysis and description of the properties of just every (more than ninety) published complexity measures (derived from flowgraphs) and a consideration of the different assumptions which have to hold for the measures to be used for various scales. Methods to analyze, to create, to discuss and to evaluate software measures are shown. The different types of software complexity measures are discussed. Criteria to perform meaningful statistical analysis with the resulting numbers are given.

The third one is a proposal of how software measurement programs can be set up. Many examples of the correct use of software complexity measures are given. The construction of a software measure database is presented. Methods to compare versions of programs using software complexity measures are proposed. A set of well defined software complexity measures for applications in software reuse and generally in practice is discussed.

Contents

  1. Introduction to Software Complexity Measurement

  2. Problems in Evaluating the Complexity of Programs

  3. Discussion about Software Measurement and Measures

  4. Measurement Theory and Criteria for Scales

  5. Models of Programs and their Definitions

  6. Ideas behind the Complexity of Programs

  7. Our Investigation of Software Complexity Measures

  8. Characterization of Software Complexity Measures

  9. Results and Research in the Future

 10. Glossary of Terms

 11. Literature