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Testwell CMT++/CMTJava

Code Complexity Measures Tool for C, C++ / Java

Why Code Complexity Analysis ?

  • Code complexity correlates with the defect rate and robustness of the application
  • Complex code is difficult to test -> more errors in the final application
  • Complex code is difficult to maintain

Complex Code - CMT Unnecessary complex code is often the reason for bad code quality and erroneous programs.
Complex code is difficult to test and to maintain.
As the costs of bad quality and erroneous programs can be very high, even crucial to a company, applications with a reasonable complexity helps you to save money.

What is measured by CMT++/CMTJava ?

Based on the static properties of the program code CMT++ and CMTJava gives estimates how error prone the program source code is due to its complexity, how long it will take to understand the code, what is the logical volume of the code, etc ...
As the project team has not usually time to inspect all the code produced by the project, CMT++/CMTJava can assist in locating the modules, which are most likely to cause problems in the future.

CMT++ and CMTJava analyses your applications for the following metrics :

a) Lines-of-code (LOC) metrics

  LOCbl number of blanc lines
  LOCcom number of lines with comments
  LOCphy number of physical lines
  LOCpro number of lines with program code

b) Halstead's metrics

  B estimated number of errors
  D difficulty level, error proneness
  E effort to implement
  L program level (abstraction level of the program)
  N program length
  N1 number of operators
  N2 numbre of operands
  n vocabulary size (unique operators + unique operands
  n1 number of unique operators
  n2 number of unique operands
  T implementation time / time to understand
  V volume: size of the implementation of an algorithm

c) McCabe cyclomatic number v(G)
Cyclomatic number v(G) describes the complexity of the control flow of a program.

d) Maintainability Index
Maintainability Index is calculated with certain formulae from lines-of-code measures, McCabe measures and Halstead measures.
The measurment and track maintainability are intended to help reduce or reverse a system's tendency toward "code entropy" or degraded integrity, and to indicate when it becomes cheaper and less risky to rewrite the code instead to change it.

CMT++ and CMTJava alarm limits can be customized

The alarm limites given by default are common suggestions, based on measurements on code maintained with good success.
Testwell complexity measures tools uses metrics established in reasearch projects during several years in the USA (Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University).
The metrics used by CMT++ and CMTJava are industrial standards.
As it is not possible to give absolute limits to acceptable values, Testwell complexity measures tools allows you to customise the alarm limit definitions of the software metrics in the configuration file for your projects specific needs.

CMT++/CMTJava Highlights :

  • mesures original non-pre-processed files
  • extremely fast -> analyses your applications in a couple of minutes
  • can handle many/big files
  • HTML or texual reporting -> measurements can be further processed by Excel
  • GUI integration in Visual C++ Developer Studio
  • Available on many platforms: Windows, Linux, HP, Solaris

Product Presentation (17 slides)

more information: CMT++/CMTJava
CMT++ (Link to www.testwell.fi)
CMTJava (Link to www.testwell.fi)


last updated: 04.01.2008

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CTA++, CTC++, CMT++ and CMTJava are products of Testwell Oy, Tampere (Finland)
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