Cognitive Weighted Response for a Class: A New Metric for Measuring Cognitive Complexity of OO Systems

Abstract

Various new techniques, methods and metrics are being developed by researchers for calculating the complexity of the class in Object Oriented (OO) software. Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) have proposed a metric suite for measuring the class complexity of OO design. CK metrics are well known and widely accepted suites of OO metrics. Among those set of metrics, Response For a Class (RFC) is one of the metrics, which is nothing but the number of methods that can be potentially executed in response to a message received by an object of a class. In RFC, each function call statement value is considered to be 1. The cognitive feature is not included in RFC metric which is felt as a major negative aspect of this metric. So here, we are proposing a new metric namely Cognitive Weighted Response For a Class (CWRFC). In CWRFC, the cognitive weights have to be assigned for the function call statement based on the effort needed to understand their type of function calls due to message passed by an object of that class. The proposed metric has been proved to be a better measure of cognitive complexity of class with function call statement through the case studies and experiments.

Keywords: Cognitive Weight, Software Complexity, Cognitive Weighted Response For a Class, Response For a Class, Message Passing.