How To Categorize Software Complexity

As developers put in a great deal of effort writing a code. But, they invest much more time maintaining and understanding that code. How frequently do we go back and find out that code has become this tangled mess that we nearly can’t even understand? It’s presumably more frequent than we acknowledge. We wonder, “How did this occur? How did this code get so messy?” Well, the most probable factor is software complexity.

What’s Software Complexity?
In the last couple of decades, software complexity has created another era in computer science. Software complexity could be characterized as the standard driver of cost, reliability, and performance of the software. Regardless, there is no common agreement on the definition of software complexity yet to lay it out simply we can say, “Software complexity is the level of challenge in analyzing, maintaining, testing, planning and modifying software.” In other words, software complexity is an issue that is in the entire software development process and each period of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
In general, software Complexity impacts the required effort to analyze and depict the requirements, design, code, test, and debug the system during the development stages of software. In maintenance stages, complexity shows the difficulty in error correction and the required effort to modify distinctive software modules.

How Can We Categorize Software Complexity?
Software Complexity is hard to evaluate without using complexity measures and there are many of them. But in this section, we’ll explore one of the widely used measures to categorize software complexity; Function Point.

FP: It is broadly used to measure the size of the software. Function Point focuses on functionality given by the system. Features and functionality of the system are used to categorize the software complexity.
Function point relies on five parameters, named External Input, External Output, Logical Internal Files, External Interface Files, and External Inquiry. To consider the complexity of software every parameter is further categorized as simple, average, or complex.

1. External Input
   Each unique input to the system, from the outside, is considered as external input. The uniqueness of input is estimated, as no two information sources should have the same formats.
   • Simple- whenever input count is low
   • Complex – whenever input count is high
   • Average – in the middle of simple and complex.
2. External Output
   All output types given by the system are included in this class. Output is considered unique if their output type is unique.
   • Simple- whenever output count is low
   • Complex – whenever output count is high
   • Average – in the middle of simple and complex.
3. Logical Internal Files
   Each software system maintains files to maintain its functional data and to function appropriately. These files hold logical information about the system.
   • Simple – if the number of file types is low
   • Complex – if the number of file types is high
   • Average – in the middle of simple and complex.
4. External Interface Files
   The software system may have to share its files with some external software or it might have to share the file for processing to some function. Every one of these files is considered external interface records.
   • Simple – if the number of file types in the shared file is low
   • Complex – if the number of file types in the shared file is high
   • Average – in the middle of simple and complex.
5. External Inquiry
   An inquiry is a mixture of input and output, where the user sends some input to ask about as input and the system responds to the user with the output of the inquiry process.
   • Simple – if inquiry needs low processing and gives a small amount of output information
   • Complex – if inquiry needs high processing and gives a huge amount of output information
   • Average- in the middle of simple and complex.

Conclusion
Complexity is a subject that can be very intimidating to developers. In any case, that is a result of the theory and the language surrounding the idea. They cause it to appear to be more complex than it is actually. All you need to do is to keep your functions and methods smaller. If you observe that they’re getting large, figure out how to break them into smaller ones. That is all that there is to it.