Improvement Insights Blog

Is it possible to make software more maintainable and testable using software metrics?

Download my free ebook, Agile Process Innovation – Hacking Lean Six Sigma for Results.

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].

“Back in the 80s, I wrote a book called ‘Measuring Programmer Productivity and Software Quality,’ and strangely enough, it started to be referenced now 35 years later. I see articles; academia sends me things about it. There was a thing in there called ‘McCabe cyclomatic complexity’ which said if the number of decisions in a piece of software exceeds 10 then it starts to become unmaintainable, and when you get to about 49 or 50, it becomes completely unmaintainable and untestable.

“That’s one of the reasons for the way I built QI Macros was to minimize McCabe cyclomatic complexity per module, and also do a lot of reuse to have things that I need and just reuse them over and over and over again. I learned that from working in Unix shell programming long ago. (I wrote a book about that, too.)

“But I want you to get this idea that we can take things like software development and make it so that it’s very maintainable, very maintainable, enhanceable… there’s ways to go about that. And then you end up with software that doesn’t break on you so much and do wrong things you don’t like. So this may not apply to you, but if you work in IT on software, you know all about it.

“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week, like our software, and reduce McCabe cyclomatic complexity to get to something that’s more and more maintainable.”