Rule Definition
The effort and time for diagnosis of deficiencies or causes of failures, or for identification of parts to be modified is directly related to the number of execution paths, i.e. the complexity of the control flow.
Analyzability declines with increasing Cyclomatic Complexity.
Each modification must be correct for all execution paths. Cyclomatic Complexity computes the number of the linearly independent paths, a lower bound of all execution paths ignoring multiple iterations.
Changeability declines with increasing Cyclomatic Complexity.
Complete testing requires coverage of all execution paths. Cyclomatic Complexity computes the number of the linearly independent paths, a lower bound of all execution paths ignoring multiple iterations.
Testability declines with increasing Cyclomatic Complexity.
Reference
Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute on Cyclomatic Complexity
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/95cm028.pdf
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric
http://hissa.nist.gov/HHRFdata/Artifacts/ITLdoc/235/sttoc.htm
Related Technologies
Technical Criterion
Complexity - Algorithmic and Control Structure Complexity
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