8.2 Some Legacy Characterizations of Design Attributes
The characterizations of design attributes in the early days of software engineering dealt more with detail design and coding level attributes rather than the architectural design level. This is not surprising because programming and program modules were considered the most important artifacts for a long time. Thus the corresponding measurements were also targeted at the detail design and coding elements. We will describe some of the leading, early complexity measures for program modules and intermodular structures.
8.2.1 Halstead Complexity Metric
The Halstead metric, one of the earliest software metrics, was developed by the late Maurice Halstead in the 1970s, mostly to analyze program ...
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