Evaluation of Halstead and Cyclomatic Complexity Metrics in Measuring Defect Density
Software metrics are used to get reproducible measurements that can be useful for quality assurance. A recent study analyzed the relation between Halstead Complexity (HC), Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), and the number of defects found in software. The number of software defects does not represent a uniform software metric and may not be generalized. This work examines the density of defects (DD) and its relationship with HC and CC metrics. We have used a well-coded open-source project. We have focused our analysis at the class level and examined potential patterns and correlations that may exist between these two software metrics and the density of defects. We found that HC and CC exhibit similar relationships to Defect Density metric. Furthermore, their strong positive linear correlation leads to the conclusion that HC and CC are two consistent software metrics with respect to density of defects.