SMARtS: Software Metric Analyzer for Relational Database Systems

Software complexity has a strong impact on development effort and maintainability. Measurement of complexity can help managers in project planning and cost estimation. A number of metrics exist to measure the complexity for procedural and object oriented applications. In this paper we present a model to compute the complexity for small scale relational database applications. Our model is based on different relational database objects. Complexity of each database object is computed by assigning suitable weights to its complexity determining factors. To evaluate our model, we have applied correlation analysis on computed complexity and actual effort. The results indicate a strong correlation between the effort and complexity computed by our model.