Cognitive Weighted Method Hiding Factor Complexity Metric

Method hiding plays a key role by serving the foundation for several guidelines in object-oriented software design. It brings about plethora of benefits such as easy comprehension, secured accessibility, modifiability without side-effects, modular testing, higher reliability etc. But, it has to be handled carefully since very low method hiding may result in insufficiently abstracted implementation and very high method hiding will lead to very little functionality. Hence, the method hiding factor has to be measured accurately in order to produce quality software. This article, proposes a new Cognitive Weighted Method Hiding Factor (CWMHF) complexity metric. It measures not only the software structural complexity, but also the cognitive complexity on the basis of type. The cognitive weights are calibrated based on 27 empirical studies with 120 persons. A case study and experimentation of the new software metric shows encouraging results. Further, a comparative study is made and the correlation test has proved that CWMHF complexity metric is a better, more realistic, and more comprehensive indicator of the software complexity than the existing Abreu’s Method Hiding Factor complexity metric.