Over on the libresoft mailing list we're having a conversation about
interpretation of complexity metrics (e.g. McCabe cyclometic
complexity etc). The studies that we know on this metric demonstrate
that the metric is useful to predict bugs, but I often hear the
further interpretation that complexity actually causes more bugs (or
inhibits their fixes) because the code is harder to understand.
That interpretation seems to need stronger validation than the
correlational studies. I thought this forum might know of some
studies that approach this. For example has anyone tried to measure
the impact of (e.g.) higher cyclometric complexity on the speed of
fixing a bug in code? I'm thinking of some comparison of effort to
fix the "same bug" with different coding styles (one with high
cyclometric complexity, one with lots of function calls, something
else)?
An alternative explanation of the correlation might be that complexity
metrics measure the difficulty of work (ie difficulty of the work is
driving both the complexity and the bugs, at the same time).
Thanks,
James
http://james.howison.name
