Design and Analysis of Hierarchical Software Metrics

Abstract

One of the main goals of software engineering is to assess the quality of the software we develop, however this is to be measured. A software metric, assigning a number to each piece of program text, will generally attempt to address one or more quality attributes in its assessment. These might include software reliability, testability, maintainability, and the like, and, in general, a kind of complexity of the software in some specific and restricted sense. In this tutorial a new cubic flowgraph model is introduced and shown to be useful in exploring a whole range of software metric design and analysis techniques, specifically in reference to the subclass of software metrics that are said to be “hierarchical.” In particular, the cubic flowgraph model leads to the discovery of certain inequalities among existing metrics, serves to provide a new characterization of the important class of prime flowgraphs, and points the way to an effective method for counting and enumerating the primes. © 1995, ACM. All rights reserved.