A generalized approach for control structure based complexity measure

Abstract

Metrics plays an important role in the software modularization. Several metrics have been discussed so far. This paper describes a metrics based on control structures which is a minor modification of McCabe's approach. Proposed generalized approach is a control structure based complexity (CSBC) which is used to compute the complexity by counting the control structures directly from the source code rather than finding out predicate node from the control flow graph (CFG) as in McCabe cyclomatic complexity metric. Proposed generalized approach also overcomes the potential implementation problem of the existing McCabe approach based on predicate node that only applies to individual module (function) rather than on n modules. To effectively aid the software assessment a metric tool is developed to support the software metric. Therefore, this paper introduced a software metric tool (SMT) to provide an automated software metric support for users.