AFOSR-F49620-80-C-O01 METRIC ANALYSIS AND DATA VALIDATION ACROSS FORTRAN PROJECTS *

_i N,T][NTIONALL_BI..AN[ The desire to predict the effort in developing or explain the quality of software has led to the proposal of several metrics in the literature. As a step toward valldating these metrics, the Software Engineering Laboratory has analysed the Software Science metrics, cyclomatic complexity and various standard program meas-ures fop their relation to 1) effort (including design through acceptance testing), 2) development errors (both discrete and weighted according to the amount of time to locate and fix) and 3) one another. The data investigated are collected from a pro-duction FORTRAN environment and examined across several projects at once, within Individual projects and by individual programmers across projects, with three effort reporting accuracy checks demonstratlng the need to validate a database. When the data come from individual programmers or certain validated projects, the metrics " correlations with actual effort seem to be strong-est. For modules developed entirely by indlvidual programmers, the validity ratios induce a statistically significant ordering of several of the metrics " correlations. When comparing the strongest correlations, neither Software Science's E metrIQ, cyclomatic complexity nor source lines of code appears to relate convincingly better with effort than the others