Measuring Business Logic Complexity in Software Systems

Abstract

Many organizations adopt software to support their business process and business logic is embedded in their systems. To meet ever-changing business needs, business logic in software must be continuously changed and renewing the whole system as known as software modernization is performed for systems running for a long time. When modernizing especially large scale system, many developers are involved to deal with large amount of code. To support software modernization, project management is needed and managers use volume information such as software metrics to find hard things, estimate efforts and qualities though when analyzing business logic, existing metrics are not useful because existing metrics do not distinguish business logic from other infrastructure activities. To solve this problem we define business logic complexity to capture business logic from the source code and to quantify how hard it is to understand. First we identify business logic by excluding format checks and by using input and output data in condition and calculation statements. Next, we quantify the degree of complexity of business logic. When making decisions about improving applications, our method makes it possible to prioritize the aspects of the business logic that are complex and hard to understand.