Cognitive Complexity of Software and Its Measurement
The estimation and measurement of functional complexity of software are an age-long problem in software engineering. The cognitive complexity of software presented in this paper is a new measurement for cross-platform analysis of complexities, sizes, and comprehension effort of software specifications and implementations in the phases of design, implementation, and maintenance in software engineering. This paper reveals that the cognitive complexity of software is a product of its architectural and operational complexities on the basis of deductive semantics and the abstract system theory. Ten fundamental basic control structures (BCSs) are elicited from software architectural and behavioral specifications and descriptions. The cognitive weights of those BCSs are derived and calibrated via a series of psychological experiments. Based on mis work, the cognitive complexity of software systems can be rigorously and accurately measured and analyzed Comparative case studies demonstrate that the cognitive complexity is highly distinguishable in software functional complexity and size measurement in software engineering.
Cognitive informatics software engineering BCS cognitive weights cognitive complexity psychological experiments calibrated weights cognitive functional size.
Yingxu Wang
International Center for Cognitive Informatics (ICfCI) Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Calgary 2500 University Drive, NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4
国际会议
Firth IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics(第五届认知信息国际会议)
北京
英文
226-235
2006-07-17（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）