Software Engineering

4.3.8 
Software complexity measures
The software engineering team must identify the measures by which the complex-
ity of the software product will be appraised. At a minimum, these measures of 
software product complexity should be established that can be used to aid design 
decision making. The first measure should address a measure of the operational or 
business process complexity
 the software product is intended to automate. The 
other measures should address complexity associated with the interdependencies 
among elements within the software product architecture.
The process complexity can be obtained by constructing a static or dynamic 
model of the software product operations within the operational or business envi-
ronment. The software product complexity necessitates three interrelated measures 
that address the evolution of the product architecture:
1. 
The number of stakeholder requirements and the perceived 
computational intri-
cacy
 that can be applied against the software requirements specifications.
2. 
The 
functional collaboration dependency
 that addresses the number of user, 
database, external, and internal interactions or data exchanges identified within 
the functional architecture.
3. 
The 
structural density
 of the product architecture that addresses the number of 
component integration actions needed to assemble the software product.
These three measures provide a gage for each element of the software product 
architecture. 
 provide a description for the computational 
intricacy, functional collaboration dependency, and structural density software com-
plexity measures.
2 
G. M. Muketha, A.A.A. Ghani, M. H. Selamat, and R. Atan (2008). A Survey of Business Process 
Complexity Metrics, available at 
http://scialert.net/fulltext/?doi
=
itj.2010.1336.1344&org
=
11
.

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