GENERALIZED-APPROACH TO SOFTWARE STRUCTURE METRICS

The aim of this paper is to generalise the Fenton-Whitty-Kaposi (FWK) approach to structure software metrics by considering arbitrary sets o f decomposition operations for flowgraphs. In the FWK approach, decomp osition of flowgraphs is unique, but the number of associated metric f unctions is not finite and these functions are all independent. In gen eral, the decomposition of flowgraphs is not unique, which leads to co nstraints on the associated metric functions. Here we derive these con straints explicitly for two special cases, where we consider only the two operations sequencing and nesting as decomposition operations. It is shown that the two resulting classes of structure metrics are conta ined in the class of recursive structure metrics of the FWK approach.