Code Cognitive Complexity: A New Measure

There are different facets of software complexity, some of which have been computed using widely accepted metrics like cyclomatic complexity, data/information flow metrics, but very less attempts have been made to measure the cognitive aspect of the complexity. The human mind's efforts needed for the comprehension of the source code reflect a different dimension of complexity, which is being measured in this paper. There are two aspects of the readability of the source code. One of these is spatial aspect and the other is architectural aspect. This paper is an attempt to measure the cognitive complexity of the source code, by integrating the spatial distances, impact of control statements, and effect of input & output parameters. The proposed metric is evaluated against 5 different programs and also compared with standalone metrics to prove its usefulness.