An approach to predict software maintenance cost based on ripple complexity
T. Hirota, Masaharu Tohki, C. Michael Overstreet, Masami Hashimoto, R. Cherinka · 2002
Almost half of a software maintainer's time is spent trying to understand programs. This means that software maintenance cost prediction depends on software understandability. We have proposed ripple complexity as a means to predict program understandability. This paper describes an experiment to prove the usefulness of ripple complexity. The result of this experiment has shown that ripple complexity is more closely related to program understandability than lines of source code, cyclomatic complexity and function point analysis.>