Los Angeles ACM Chapter Meeting
Wednesday, March 4, 1998
Every large-scale software development project seems to be plagued by cost overruns and schedule slippage. Software metrics attempt to quantify various attributes of a software process or product in order to facilitate better management of software development. Metrics such as "milestones met" or "number of faults remaining" measure the software process while structural complexity, quality, etc., try to quantify attributes of the software product. Metrics relating to complexity attempt to measure the amount of human resources needed to develop and maintain software with the idea being that high levels of complexity correlate with unreliability, high maintenance costs, and excessive development and testing efforts.
In this talk, we examine several different complexity measures (McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity, Halstead, Dataflow, Function Points, COCOMO 2.0, and Paige's Level Path Complexity). By looking at these measures from the perspective of measurement theory and axiomatic models (Weyuker, Zuse, Bache, and Program Decomposition), we conclude that none of these metrics meet the complementary requirements of acceptable axiomatization and measurement theory. We then describe a machine (language) independent theory of structural complexity that shows the limit of what can be "measured" via complexity.
Robert T. Bauer has more than 15 years of architecture, design, and coding experience. He has spent the last five years as a department architect, designing and developing test infrastructures for a massively parallel large scale database (teradata). He has written several papers on testing theory and methodology. Robert has a BSIE/EE and an MSCS and has done graduate work in bifurcation theory.
Please join us for dinner. The charge is $19 with a reservation, $21 without.
There is always a choice of beef, either chicken or fish, or vegetarian plate.
Dinner is served at 7:00 PM with a preceding social hour at 6:30 PM.
To make a reservation, contact Ed Manderfield, (310) 391-5936, and indicate your choice of entree, by Sunday before the dinner meeting. There is no charge or reservation required to attend the program.
For membership information, contact Lee Schmidt, (805) 393-6224.
Last revision: 1998 Feb 22 [ls]