A Study And Experimental Assessment Of The Cognitive Weight, Base Of The Cognitive Metrics

Source code metrics have been used as indicators of code comprehension according to its complexity. Shao and Wang proposed a cognitive complexity measure based on the cognitive weight of the basic control structures. This cognitive weight is a fixed value assigned to each control structure, which was calculated by means of a series of empirical experiments. Given the lack of information and incompleteness of the experiments, improvements to these experiments must be made before a measure can be used. In this paper, a study on the overall state of the cognitive weight, including its experiments, is presented, along with an empirical experiment which will help us to assess the validity and accuracy of the cognitive weight. The experiment consists of applying a survey to 114 students. It contains source code complexity and comprehension questions that allow us to obtain conclusions about the validity of the cognitive weight.