A New Weighted Composite Complexity Measure for Object-Oriented Systems

Controlling and minimizing software complexity is the most important objective of each software development paradigm because it affects all other software quality attributes like reusability, reliability, testability, maintainability etc. For this purpose, a number of software complexity measures have been reported to quantify different aspects of complexity. As the development of object-oriented software is rising, more and more complexity metrics are being developed for the same. In this paper, we have attempted to design a weighted composite complexity measure by employing the concept of weights to quantify various aspects of complexity which may arise due to inheritance level, type and nesting level of control structures, and size of the class/program. The proposed weighted measure yields quiet interesting results and insight into various complexity aspects of software. Estimation of the new measure is also compared with four Chidamber and Kemerer’s (CK) metrics – weighted methods per class (WMC), number of children (NOC), depth of inheritance tree (DIT), coupling between objects (CBO) and McCabe’s complexity measure v(G) and is illustrated by practical programs.