SOFTWARE OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUES - Software Design for Six-Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence - page 439

Each of these factors can be used to calculate the function point, where the
calculation will depend on the weight of each factor. For example, one set of weighing
factors might yield a function point value calculated as:

FP = 4I + 4O + 5Q + 10F + 7X

The complexity of a system can be adjusted accordingly and can be adapted to
adjust for other types of applications, such as real-time systems. The function point
metric mostly has been used in business processing; however, there is an increasing
interest in using the function point metric in embedded systems. In particular, systems
such as large-scale real-time databases, multimedia, and Internet support are data
driven and behave like the large-scale transaction-based systems for which function
points initially were developed.
Function point metrics have become the dominant metric for serious economic
and quality studies (Capers Jones & Associates, 2008). However, several issues have
kept function point metrics from becoming the industry standard for both economic
and quality studies. First, some software applications are now so large that normal
function point analysis is too slow and too expensive to be used. Second, the success
of function points has triggered an explosion of function point clones, and as of 2008,
there are at least 24 function point variations. The number of variations tends to
make baseline studies difficult because there are very few conversion rules from one
variation to another.

Conditional Complexity 5 17.2.3

Conditional complexity also can be called cyclomatic complexity. Conditional com-
plexity was developed in the mid-1970s by Thomas McCabe and is used to measure
the complexity of a program. 6 Cyclomatic complexity sometimes is referred to as
McCabe's complexity as well. This metric has two primary uses:

1. To indicate escalating complexity in a module as coded and assisting program-
mers in determining the size of a module
2. To determine the upper bound on the number of tests that must be run (LaPlante,
2005)

The complexity of a section of code is the count of the number of linearly inde-
pendent paths through the source code. To compute conditional complexity, Equation
(5.1) is used:

C = e − n + 2

5 See Chapter 5.
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic complexity