characteristic program complexity measures
Twenty program complexity measures are studied with respect to how well they identify the more complex procedures in a software system. The measures have been applied to three large sets of PL/I procedures representing three different types of applications. Four of these complexity measures have been found to form a characteristic set. That is, when procedures are kept within reasonable bounds for the four selected measures, they will most likely be within reasonable bounds for all of the other measures. The measures and their interpreted meanings are lengththe quantity of source code, unique operatorsthe variety of programming language actions, data difficultythe average number of variable appearances, and unique operandsthe variety of constants and variables.
complexity measurement procedure software systems types applications mean programming language action variability operability source-code software complexity> software measurement