Psychological experiments on the cognitive complexities of fundamental control structures of software systems

The measurement of cognitive complexity and functional size of software systems are an age-long problem in software engineering. Although, the symbolic complexity of software may be measured in lines of code, the functional complexity of software is too abstract to be measured or even estimated. Because numerous attributes of software systems are highly dependent on the understanding and measurability of software functional complicity, it has to be formally treated and empirically studied based on cognitive informatics and theoretical software engineering methodologies. This talk reveals that the cognitive functional size (CFS) of software is a product of its architectural and operational complexities based on the studies in cognitive informatics and abstract system theories. The fundamental basic control structures (BCSs) are elicited from software architectural and behavioral specifications and descriptions. The cognitive weights of those BCSs are derived and calibrated via a series of psychological experiments. Based on this work, CFS of a software system may be rigorously measured and analyzed by the unit of function-object (FO).