Cyclomatic Complexity for WCF: A Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract

SOA is a latest architecture for softwares and a lot of tools are available to implement this architecture. Critics of cyclomatic complexity argue that complexity changes with modularization of code. If the technology is shifted from linear programming to OOP and SOA, the complexity of code will also change. The cyclomatic complexity was for the first time introduced by TJ McCabe as metric for the measurement of complexity of a piece of code. McCabe calculated the complexity of a sample code written in fortran language. Fortran is a linear programming language and there are no functions and classes in this language. Hence at the time of introducing cyclomatic complexity there was no concept of structured languages and object oriented languages. This is ignored in McCabes's cyclomatic complexity due to which it is not enough to measure complexity for advance programming architectures like OOP and SOA. Further work has been done on the complexity of structured, OOP and SOA but still work is required on SOA. This study proposes a new metric for the measurement of complexity of WCF a SOA. The significance of this new metric is that it can help to estimate cost of a new project, maintenance cost of already existing projects, basis path testing, comparison of two projects and many other factors.