(A) study on the software complexity measures based on data flow information

Abstract

Software complexity measure is believed to be the most objective and quantitative measure for the control of a software project. In this thesis, we propose a new approach for representing the software complexity. The complexity measure based on data flow information is defined as the maximum number of definition-use chains potentially contained in a program control graph. We investigate some characteristics of thus defined measure and compare its properties with those of existing measures, through experiments and statistical analysis with sample programs in order to show that this new measure has several advantages over the others. We also develop a tool a given program.