4 ms·

Here's one study showing that complexity grows exponentially with the size of the program: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/sparc/Resources/readings/berry.pdf http://w

• gruseom 15y ago
  Thanks, I'll take a look. This point from the abstract of the latter is highly reminiscent of the paper cited by the OP: "Repair maintenance is more highly correlated with the number of lines of source code in the program than it is to software science metrics." Edit: I read it. This must certainly be one of the studies people are referring to; it covers exactly the question of interest. The major limitation is that all the programs were in PL/I, so it says nothing about language-independence. The important finding is that line count was the most highly correlated variable with bug count of those studied, quite a bit more so than more complex metrics were (Halstead's E). It's also interesting that although the authors write, "There are some very large programs in this set," the largest program was in fact only a very modest (by our standards) 6572 lines of PL/I.
  • deleted 15y ago
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