Experimental Evaluation of On-Line Program Construction.

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to assess the utility of complexity metrics for the prediction of programmer performance in the construction of software. After practicing on a preliminary program, each of the nine participants developed three experimental programs on-line. An English language description of each problem was presented in addition to one of the following specification formats: program design language, tree chart, and both of these techniques. No significant differences were found in the times to construct programs from these different types of specification formats. The software complexity metrics developed by Halstead and McCabe were found to be significantly better predictors of the time to complete the program than the number of statements. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1979
Accession Number
ADA082687

Entities

People

  • Bill Curtis
  • Phil Milliman
  • Sylvia B. Sheppard

Organizations

  • General Electric

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Applied Psychology
  • Cognition
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Debugging
  • Department Of Defense
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Information Science
  • Military Research
  • Operating Systems
  • Psychology
  • Software Development
  • System Software
  • Systems Engineering
  • Systems Management

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Library and Information Science
  • Software Engineering.