Profiling software complexity

Abstract

This paper deals with a new perspective on complexity metrics and their uses during the testing phase of software development. In keeping with traditional viewpoints, the complexity of a code fragment is assumed to be correlated with its error-proneness or its maintenance difficulty, so that the higher the complexity, the more likely the existence of errors. While the theories advocated here are applicable to any procedural language, the prototype version currently under development is based on Ada.