A modified cognitive complexity metric to improve the readability of object-oriented software

Abstract

Complexity of software can be identified as a term which expresses the difficulty level of reading, understanding, maintaining and modifying the software. This helps to the quality improvement of the software and maintenance process of the software through a long time period without any obstacle. Therefore, software complexity metrics have been introduced to calculate the complexity of a software using numerical values. While there are number of metrics which calculate the complexity of object-oriented programs, they only consider one or two object-oriented concepts. As a result of that, there is no single metric which has the capability of measuring the complexity of a program based on multiple object-oriented concepts. This research aims to build a new metric to evaluate the complexity of an object-oriented program in order to improve the readability. The new metric has been built based on the influence of previous object-oriented metrics and some disregarded factors in calculating the complexity. In order to evaluate the new metric, Weyuker's properties and Briand's properties are used. The new metric acquires most of the object-oriented concepts in calculating the complexity and helps to improve the readability of the software as well. In fact, it makes it easy to handle the maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability of the software, when readability is high. This will result in increasing the overall software quality.