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Cyclomatic complexity density and software maintenance productivity
Abstract
A study of the relationship between the cyclomatic complexity metric (T. McCabe, 1976) and software maintenance productivity, given that a metric that measures complexity should prove to be a useful predictor of maintenance costs, is reported. The cyclomatic complexity metric is a measure of the maximum number of linearly independent circuits in a program control graph. 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 maintenance projects.>
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Cited by
Software complexity and maintenance costs
Banker, R. D., Datar, S. M., Kemerer, C. F., & Zweig, D. (1993) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/163359.163375 · Cited by 334
Self-citationWhat Predicts Software Developers’ Productivity?
Murphy-Hill, E., Jaspan, C., Sadowski, C., Shepherd, D., Phillips, M., Winter, C., Knight, A., Smith, E., & Jorde, M. (2021) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2019.2900308 · Cited by 100
Landman, D., Serebrenik, A., Bouwers, E., & Vinju, J. J. (2016) · Journal of Software: Evolution and Process · doi:10.1002/smr.1760 · Cited by 29
An eye tracking study assessing source code readability rules for program comprehension
Park, K.-I., Johnson, J., Peterson, C. S., Yedla, N., Baysinger, I., Aponte, J., & Sharif, B. (2024) · Empirical Software Engineering · doi:10.1007/s10664-024-10532-x · Cited by 9
Metadata
- Authors
- Gill, G. K., & Kemerer, C. F.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 1991
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 1284-1288
- ISSN
- 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2148423957
- Cited by
- 229
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 10.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Gill, G. K., & Kemerer, C. F. (1991). Cyclomatic complexity density and software maintenance productivity. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/32.106988
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