Metrics research has gained a lot of attention from the Software Center and the results showed that tackling the complexity requires a holistic approach. Now, recently I’ve encountered a book which talked about the same principles, although at a more beginner level – “Your code as a Crime Scene” by Adam Tornhill.
The book uses metaphors of crime scene investigations to describe troubleshooting the code. I recommend this as the starting point. Readers who are interested in the going deeper into this topic should look at one of the recent PhD thesis from software center, by Dr. Vard Antinyan.
The thesis investigates the complexity of the software code, requirements and test cases. The conclusions from the work is that we can monitor the evolution of complexity using very common measures — e.g. McCabe complexity combined with the number of changes in the code. Dr. Antinyan provided even a number of tools to monitor the complexity.
The thesis can be found here: http://web.student.chalmers.se/~vard/files/Thesis.pdf.
