Design and code traceability using a PDL metrics tool

This paper describes an analysis tool that extracts complexity metrics from Program Design Language (PDL) as contained in design specification documents. The tool analyzes pseudocode and computes token-count metrics of PDL complexity on a module by module basis. We used the tool to measure consistency within and across modules and for assessing traceability between PDL and the corresponding source code. In applications of the tool we were able to identify PDL descriptions that were too detailed, those lacking sufficient detail, identify inconsistent PDL descriptions, and measure traceability between the PDL description and the corresponding source code