Re: McCabe package for Ada?

[sparky!sparky!dwb@uunet.uu.net (David Boyd)]

In article <1te87gINNt5f@umbc7.umbc.edu>, berman@umbc.edu (Mike Berman) writes:

|> The point of this post is to say that McCabe complexity analysis is
|> useful, but should be supplemented by a suite of tools to look at code
|> from other perspectives. The cyclomatic complexity measure, _by itself_,
|> tells you nothing (as Wes pointed out), especially if a development
|> community knows that it is the only metric being applied (then the above
|> transformation is done solely for the purposes of reducing the complexity
|> score).
	I have to agree with Mike here.  No single metric can define
complexity.  You must look at a number of different factors/metrics and
look for several bad cases together.  For instance if I have a module with
two consectutive case statements each with 10 seperate cases my cyclomatic
complexity is going to be close to 100.  However if I look at essential
complexity it will be 1.  

	In Mike's example, the problem would be indicated by high S0 and
S1 metrics (program design complexity and program integration complexity).
S1 is specifically the number of integration tests (or linearly independent
subtrees) for the program.
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