Towards Spatial Complexity Measures for Comprehension of Java Programs

Abstract

The software comprehension is an important activity that influences a variety of software engineering tasks. Software comprehension is required when a software engineer maintains, reuses, and reengineers software systems. In order to understand a program, we need to look at human factors involved in the comprehension process. Program comprehension is a complex cognitive skill, which requires understanding of spatial orientations of the program entities. These spatial orientations of the program entities give rise to the spatial complexity of program. Various spatial complexity measures have been proposed to characterize the difficulty of understanding programs. This paper tries to extend these measures especially for the comprehension of Java programs. This paper identifies two spatial complexity measures for Java programs, which are based on classes and objects. The proposed measures have been applied to 10 different software projects developed using Java and the results obtained, have been used to draw a number of conclusions.

Evaluation of object-oriented spatial complexity measures

“…The computation of software complexity has been carried out by the researchers using various affecting attributes like control flow paths [12], the volume of operands and operators [9], identifier density [10], cognitive complexity [14], [15], [23], [24] and spatial complexity [3], [4], [6], [8]. Spatial complexity metrics indicate the difficulty of understanding the logic of the program in terms of lines of code that the reader is required to traverse to follow control or data dependencies as they build a mental model [8].…”