Complexity measure evaluation and selection

A formal model of program complexity developed earlier by the authors is used to derive evaluation criteria for program complexity measures. This is then used to determine which measures are appropriate within a particular application domain. A set of rules for determining feasible measures for a particular application domain are given, and an evaluation model for choosing among alternative feasible measures is presented. This model is used to select measures from the classification trees produced by the empirically guided software development environment of R.W. Selby and A.A. Porter, and early experiments show it to be an effective process.<>