Cyclomatic Complexity Metrics for Software Architecture Maintenance Risk Assessment

A well-defined strategy is a key to successful software project maintenance as it enables change management and minimize risks associated with the future operation of the software. Software maintainers usually are not engaged in the initial software development cycle. Before maintainers can modify a program, they must understand how it operates. This research established that there exist various research gaps in literature in the architecture analysis methods and of interest was that of maintainability risk assessment at the architecture level and as a result a method was proposed to address the maintainability risk assessment research gap identified. An experiment was designed to validate the developed method for maintainability risk assessment at the architecture level, from the results of the experiment it was established modules participating in design patterns are less change prone, they promote easy of change; hence classes participating in patterns should require fewer changes and that McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity measure is useful in determining the complexity of the implementation mechanism at the architecture level which is useful for the maintainability risk assessment at the architecture level.