Quantitative Analysis of Software Code by States
Benjamin Menhorn, Frank Slomka · 2013
In software engineering the determination of software size is a central issue. There have been numerous publications about software size estimation methods. Although some of these methods provide very good results in specific areas, there is no method that is both abstract enough to be used on different areas and at the same time addresses complex-ity in an adequate way. This work presents a new approach for analyzing soft-ware code quantity by using states. Thereby states provide an abstract variable to measure complexity and a mathe-matical model calculates complexity. The mathematical model is based on Shannon’s information entropy. This method has successfully been applied in the field of hard-method can also be used to calculate the size of software. With states it is possible to calculate complexity of software which we call entropy. A system’s disorder is a property of a system’s state. Therefore complexity is a measurement for a system’s disorder. By changing the amount of possi-ble states of a system, complexity varies.