Development of an Improved Cognitive Complexity Metrics for Object- Oriented Codes

Abstract

Cognitive informatics helps in comprehending the software characteristics and its complexity measures can be used to predict critical information about testability of software system. In this paper, a cognitive complexity metric for C++ programming language is formulated. Since C++ is an object – oriented language, the cognitive complexity metric is capable to evaluate any object- oriented language. This paper presents a new cognitive complexity metric named Improved Cognitive Complexity Metric (ICCM) and perform a comparative study of the proposed metric with the existing metric such as NCCOP, CFS, CICM and CPCM. The result shows that the proposed metric performs better than other metrics by giving more information contained in the software and reflecting the understandability of a source code. Also, an attempt has also been made to present the relationship among ICCM, NCCOP, CICM, CFS and CPCM using Pearson correlation coefficient method.