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A Complexity Measure

Published: 01 July 1976 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes a graph-theoretic complexity measure and illustrates how it can be used to manage and control program complexity. The paper first explains how the graph-theory concepts apply and gives an intuitive explanation of the graph concepts in programming terms. The control graphs of several actual Fortran programs are then presented to illustrate the correlation between intuitive complexity and the graph-theoretic complexity. Several properties of the graph-theoretic complexity are then proved which show, for example, that complexity is independent of physical size (adding or subtracting functional statements leaves complexity unchanged) and complexity depends only on the decision structure of a program.

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Published In

cover image IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering  Volume 2, Issue 4
July 1976
95 pages

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 01 July 1976

Author Tags

  1. Basis
  2. complexity measure
  3. control flow
  4. decomposition
  5. graph theory
  6. independence
  7. linear
  8. modularization
  9. programming
  10. reduction
  11. software
  12. testing

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Cited By

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  • (2024)HITS: High-coverage LLM-based Unit Test Generation via Method SlicingProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695501(1258-1268)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Rust-twins: Automatic Rust Compiler Testing through Program Mutation and Dual Macros GenerationProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695059(631-642)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)WaDec: Decompiling WebAssembly Using Large Language ModelProceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3691620.3695020(481-492)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Using Conditions and Control Structures Effectively: Can We Measure This?Proceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research10.1145/3677619.3678128(1-2)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
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  • (2024)A Folklore Confirmation on the Removal of Dead CodeProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661188(333-338)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
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