Determing The Complexity of a Program to Aid Programming

Computing is a growing industry. Teaching coding to beginning programmers has focused mainly on the introduction of a language and writing correct code. Little attention has been given to strategies for writing highly efficient code. Clemson University, in hopes of helping their students learn to program, has created a prototype server that uses two metrics to quantify the efficiency of a programmer’s code. The quantified values display the complexity of a source code, which in turn determines the code’s quality. In this paper we discuss a third metric to further define the efficiency of a code. Using a heuristic, we were able to calculate a suitable value for the order of complexity (big-O), of any source code based on its execution time. This algorithm will be added to the prototype server and provide additional information for Clemson students as they learn how to program