Software Functional Complexity Using a New Set of Criteria

Abstract

With the rapid technology advances, there is an emerging consensus that the size and complexity of software designs are increasing so rapidly that they proportionally affect the magnitude of administrative and development efforts. An important consideration is how to estimate software complexity. This subject continues to be a research topic in the literature. The software design process researched here uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams and the database design for extracting pertinent information. The Entity Relationship (ER) model of Peter Chen (of MIT) is a conceptual method of describing the data in a relational structure. An Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) and an Entity Relationship Schema (ERS) represents the ER model, containing the entities, attributes, primary and foreign keys, and the relationships between the entities. Extending this ERS modeling construct, this paper uses an additional enhanced schema, called the Object Relationship Schema (ORS), which, together with the existing ERS, creates an enhanced view of the requirements and the design of the database. In addition, functional dependency, security, computational complexity, use cases, component structure and interpretations are considered for estimating functional complexity of modern software systems which is very valuable in higher education for new workforce development.