Author(s)

J.Y. Kuo & D.S. Morris

Abstract

Towards a measurement of ADT's design complexity J.Y. Kuo & D.S. Morris Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, USA ABSTRACT As software system have become more complex, the need for better ab- straction mechanisms has led to the widespread use of abstract data types (ADT's). A measure of ADT design complexity is an important factor in describing, explaining, evaluating, and predicting key aspects of the devel- opment and maintenance of software systems that use them. This paper discusses a novel method for measuring the design complexity of an ADT through the process of proving its correctness. Then, the relative design complexity of ADT's is expressed in terms of the relative complexity of abstract-to-concrete representation mappings. Comparisons among the re- sults of the developed complexity measure and the results of an experimental study conducted to investigate this issue are giv

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