On the relationships among three software metrics

Abstract

Automatable metrics of software quality appear to have numerous advantages in the design, construction and maintenance of software systems. While numerous such metrics have been defined, and several of them have been validated on actual systems, significant work remains to be done to establish the relationships among these metrics. This paper reports the results of correlation studies made among three complexity metrics which were applied to the same software system. The three complexity metrics used were Halstead's effort, McCabe's cyclomatic complexity and Henry and Kafura's information flow complexity. The common software system was the UNIX operating system. The primary result of this study is that Halstead's and McCabe's metrics are highly correlated while the information flow metric appears to be an independent measure of complexity.