The Shape of Code

My experience is that people prefer to ignore the implications of Halstead’s metric and McCabe’s complexity metric being strongly correlated (non-linearly) with lines of code (LOC). The implications being that they have been deluding themselves and perhaps wasting time/money using Halstead/McCabe when they could just as well have used LOC.

If the purpose of collecting metrics is a requirement to tick a box, then it does not really matter which metrics are collected. The Halstead/McCabe metrics have a strong brand, so why not collect them.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Halstead/McCabe is more than a complicated way of calculating LOC. This can be shown by replacing Halstead/McCabe by the corresponding LOC value to find that it makes little difference to the value calculated.

Some metrics include the Halstead metrics and/or the McCabe metric as part of their calculation. The Maintainability Index is a metric calculated using Halstead’s volume, McCabe’s complexity and lines of code. Its equation is (see below for details):

Replacing the Halstead/McCabe terms by one involving just LOC requires an appropriate mapping. Nearly all researchers assume a linear mapping, despite the overwhelming evidence that the mapping is non-linear.

Fitting regression models for HalsteadVolume vs LOC and McCabe vs LOC, using measurements of 730K methods from 47 Java projects (see below for data details), produces the coefficients for the equation needed to map each metric to LOC (previous analysis has found that a power law provides the best mapping; code+data). Substituting these equations in the Maintainability Index equation above, we get:

which simplifies to:

How does the value calculated using compare with the corresponding value?

For 99.7% of methods, the relative error, , for the 730K Java methods is less than 10%, and for 98.6% of methods the relative error is less than 5% (code+data).

Given the fuzzy nature of these metrics, 10% is essentially noise.

Looking at the relative contributions made by Halstead/McCabe/LOC to the value of the Maintainability Index, second equation above, the Halstead contribution is around a third the size of the LOC contribution and the McCabe contribution is at least an order of magnitude smaller.

Background on the Maintainability Index and the measured Java projects.

The Maintainability Index was introduced in the 1994 paper “Construction and Testing of Polynomials Predicting Software Maintainability” by Oman, and Hagemeister (270 citations; no online pdf), a 1992 paper by the same authors is often incorrectly cited (426 citations). The earlier 1992 paper identified 92 known maintainability attributes, along with 60 metrics for “… gauging software maintainability …” (extracted from 35 published papers).

This Maintainability Index equation was chosen from “Approximately 50 regression models were constructed and tested in our attempts to identify simple models that could be calculated from existing tools and still be generic enough to be applied to a wide range of software.” The data fitted came from eight suites of programs (average LOC 3,568 per suite), along “… with subjective engineering assessments of the quality and maintainability of each set of code.”

Yes, choosing from 50 regression models looks like overfitting, and by today’s standards 28.5K LOC is a tiny amount of source.

The data used is distributed with the paper Revisiting the Debate: Are Code Metrics Useful for Measuring Maintenance Effort? by Chowdhury, Holmes, Zaidman, and Kazman, which does a good job of outlining the many different definitions of maintenance and the inconsistent results from prediction models. However, the authors remain under the street light of project source code, i.e., they ignore the fact that many maintenance requests are driven by demand for new features.

The authors investigate the impact of normalizing Halstead/McCabe by LOC, but make the common mistake of assuming a linear relationship. They are surprised by the high correlation between post-‘normalised’ Halstead/McCabe and LOC. The correlation disappears when the appropriate non-linear normalization is used; see code+data.

A 2014 paper by Najm also maps the components of the Maintainability Index to LOC, but uses a linear mapping from the Halstead/McCabe terms to LOC, creating a equation whose behavior is noticeably different.