The "style metric" of Berry and Meekings is purported to quantify the lucidity of software written in the C programming language. We used a modification of this metric to try and identify error-prone software. Our results indicate that this metric seems to bear little relationship to the density of errors...
A computer program complexity measure is a measure of how easy the program is to understand, test, modify, maintain, etc. Many of these measures are derived from the control or flow graph of the program. We describe these measures graph theoretically, indicate what aspect or aspects of the program they...
There is some debate over the effect of using deeply nested control structures upon programmer comprehension. In order to test the effect of deeply nested IF-THEN-ELSE statements, we split 148 computer science students of varing backgrounds into two groups. One group received a listing of a program that made excessive...
This paper develops a new model of software maintenance based upon an objective decision rule which determines whether a given software module can be effectively modified, or if it should instead be rewritten. Completely rewriting a module can be expensive, but it can be even more expensive if the module's...