A Generalised 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 of decomposition operations for flowgraphs. In the FWK approach decomposition of flowgraphs is unique, but the number of associated metric functions is not finite and these functions are all independent. In general, the decomposition of flowgraphs is not unique, which leads to constraints on the associated metric functions. Here we derive these constraints 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 contained in the class of recursive structure metrics of the FWK approach