A Complexity Measure

This paper describes a graph-theoretic complexity measure and illustrates how it can be used to manage and control program complexity. The paper first explains how the graph-theory concepts apply and gives an intuitive explanation of the graph concepts in programming terms. The control graphs of sev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 1976-12, Vol.SE-2 (4), p.308-320
Main Author: McCabe, T.J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Basis
complexity measure
control flow
decomposition
Fluid flow measurement
Graph theory
Graphs
independence
linear
Linear programming
modularization
National security
programming
reduction
Software
Software engineering
Software maintenance
Software measurement
Software systems
Software testing
System testing
testing
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Summary:This paper describes a graph-theoretic complexity measure and illustrates how it can be used to manage and control program complexity. The paper first explains how the graph-theory concepts apply and gives an intuitive explanation of the graph concepts in programming terms. The control graphs of several actual Fortran programs are then presented to illustrate the correlation between intuitive complexity and the graph-theoretic complexity. Several properties of the graph-theoretic complexity are then proved which show, for example, that complexity is independent of physical size (adding or subtracting functional statements leaves complexity unchanged) and complexity depends only on the decision structure of a program.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.1976.233837