APPLICATIONS OF A RELATIVE COMPLEXITY METRIC FOR SOFTWARE PROJECT-MANAGEMENT

The relationships among the many software complexity metrics has made the use of these metrics somewhat untenable as project management tools. In this article, we develop the notion of a single metric, called relative complexity, which assigns a single value to each program in a program set to order the programs by their complexity. For a test data set, relative program complexity was established for 27 programs. These relative complexity data were then examined in relation to the time each of the programs spent in the debugging phase. A significant relationship was found between relative complexity and programming-debugging time as a measure of effort. It is also clear that the relative complexity metric is stable throughout the design process. It may serve as a leading indicator as to the set of programs that will require large amounts of system resources during the development and maintenance phases. © 1990.