Control flow, data flow and program complexity
Enrique Ivan Oviedo · 1984
There can be no real software engineering or programming science without objective measures for the factors which contribute to the complexity and, more generally, the quality of computer programs. Program complexity is a program attribute investigated by many researchers because of the increasing need to quantify the difficulty programmers have in writing and understanding programs and, to develop programming languages, programming methods and programming standards that yield clear and comprehensible programs. The goal of our research has been the formulation of a model of program complexity against which the complexities of alternative implementations of an algorithm can be compared. We have explored, in particular, how the concepts of control flow and data flow can be used to model the complexity of both small and large programs.