Improved cognitive information complexity measure: a metric that establishes program comprehension effort

Abstract

Understanding the software system is known as program comprehension and is a cognitive process. This cognitive process is the driving force behind creation of software that is easier to understand i.e. has lower cognitive complexity, because essentially it is the natural intelligence of human brain that describes the comprehensibility of software. The research area carrying out this study is cognitive informatics. This work has developed an improved cognitive information complexity measure (CICM) that is based on the amount of information contained in the software and encompasses all the major parameters that have a bearing on the difficulty of comprehension or cognitive complexity of software. It is also able to establish the relationship between cognitive complexity of a program and time taken to understand the program, thus mapping closely to the comprehension strategy of a person.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence

      • Cognitive science

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Software management

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools