Weighted Class Complexity: A Measure of Complexity for Object Oriented Systems

Software complexity metrics are used to predict critical information about reliability and maintainability of software systems. Object oriented software development requires a different approach to software complexity metrics. In this paper, we propose a metric to compute the structural and cognitive complexity of class by associating a weight to the class, called as Weighted Class Complexity (WCC). On the contrary, of the other metrics used for object oriented systems, proposed metric calculates the complexity of a class due to methods and attributes in terms of cognitive weight. The proposed metric has been demonstrated with OO examples. The theoretical and practical evaluations based on the information theory have shown that the proposed metric is on ratio scale and satisfies most of the parameters required by the measurement theory.