A Suite of Cognitive Complexity Metrics

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a suite of cognitive metrics for evaluating complexity of object-oriented (OO) codes. The proposed metric suite evaluates several important features of OO languages. Specifically, the proposed metrics are to measure method complexity, message complexity (coupling), attributes complexity and class complexity. We propose also a code complexity by considering the complexity due to inheritance for the whole system. All these proposed metrics (except attribute complexity) use the cognitive aspect of the code in terms of cognitive weight. All the metrics have critically examined through theoretical and empirical validation processes.