RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LINE OF CODE AND COMPLEXITY IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

This paper aims of developing a relationship between the Lines Of Code (LOG) and the software complexity. As software complexity is supposed to be the indicator of software quality, reliability, maintainability and its development cost, so the correlation between the LOG and the software complexity can provide a feedback to the development team for making the software more reliable and maintainable. The paper describes the results of an empirical investigation which shows the relationship between the LOG and McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity (MVG) in the domain of Open Source Software. The software parameters namely LOG and MVG are discussed in theoretical point of view. Empirical data was collected for two Open Source Software namely Apache Web Server, MySQL Database over ten different versions in each category. The collected data is then analyzed using a software metric tool namely C and C++ Code Counter (CCCC) to get the values for LOC and MVG. Results shows that the LOG and McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity has a positive relationship which means that as the LOG increases then the MVG also increases and inversely if the LOG decreases then the MVG also decreases. However further empirical studies are needed before these results can be generalized.