An integrating common framework for measuring cognitive software complexity

The author presents a new framework integrating diverse aspects of cognitive complexity. Methods based on communication theory are used to compute a reasonable measurement of comprehensibility integrating the contribution of diverse aspects, such as control flow, data flow, modularity or even compliance with standards, in a single value. In contrast to most published metrics, the approach is based on document/programmer interaction, rather than on document structure. He models this interaction by an abstract noisy communication channel, where perturbations stemming from decoding errors are used for complexity quantification. This new approach conforms with approved programming heuristics as well as with empirical results